Cisco Viptela SDWAN: A complete design for Large Enterprise

Today I am going to talk about the design guide of Cisco Viptela SDWAN solution in a large enterprise environment. Now most of you ask about how you define the large enterprise customer. Well large enterprises generally consists of various remote/branch sites, hub locations and Datacenter sites.

Cisco SDWAN is a way to connect all these sites via WAN as a fabric and managed by single pane of glass called as vManage in a Cisco Viptela SDWAN solution. We discussed on various topics like secure segmentation, TLOCs, Zero trust, Zero touch provisioning, Fabric operation, Application aware routing and many more.

Let’s take an example for deploying or designing WAN solution based on Cisco Viptela SDWAN fabric which may consists the sites like

• 30 Remote sites/Branch sites per region
• 3 hub locations
• 3 datacenter locations

As per the design, if we are taking three regions like Asia, Europe and Americas, so we are expecting at least these components as per the regions below

Fig 1.1- Design guide Cisco Viptela SDWAN

Region Asia

• 10 remote/branch sites, 1 hub location and 1 datacenter
• 20 x vEdges (2 for every remote location as per redundancy) for 10 remote locations
• 2 x vEdges (2 for redundancy- Hub location)
• 2 x vEdges (2 for redundancy- Datacenter location)
• 2 x vBond
• 2 x vSmart

Deployment model: Every branch/remote sites can have two links which can be MPLS, VPLS, Internet, Ethernet or 4G/LTE depends upon sites across the region. Hub location should have minimum of three links which should be like MPLS, Ethernet as EVCs and Internet. Datacenter location should have minimum of three to four links as required like MPLS, Ethernet, VPLS or Internet.

Region Americas

• 10 remote/branch sites, 1 hub location and 1 datacenter
• 20 x vEdges (2 for every remote location as per redundancy) for 10 remote locations
• 2 x vEdges (2 for redundancy- Hub location)
• 2 x vEdges (2 for redundancy- Datacenter location)
• 2 x vBond
• 2 x vSmart

Deployment model: Every branch/remote sites can have two links which can be MPLS, VPLS, Internet, Ethernet or 4G/LTE depends upon sites across the region. Hub location should have minimum of three links which should be like MPLS, Ethernet as EVCs and Internet. Datacenter location should have minimum of three to four links as required like MPLS, Ethernet, VPLS or Internet.

Fig 1.2- Deployment Models

Europe Region

• 10 remote/branch sites, 1 hub location and 1 datacenter
• 20 x vEdges (2 for every remote location as per redundancy) for 10 remote locations
• 2 x vEdges (2 for redundancy- Hub location)
• 2 x vEdges (2 for redundancy- Datacenter location)
• 2 x vBond
• 2 x vSmart

Deployment model: Every branch/remote sites can have two links which can be MPLS, VPLS, Internet, Ethernet or 4G/LTE depends upon sites across the region. Hub location should have minimum of three links which should be like MPLS, Ethernet as EVCs and Internet. Datacenter location should have minimum of three to four links as required like MPLS, Ethernet, VPLS or Internet.

Control & Management Plane Scalability
This is interesting as if we have more sites, more datacenters and more hub locations across the region how many vBond, vSmart can be used and how. Well it is basically the scalability of the controllers horizontally. So as per the Cisco Viptela SDWAN solution and the recommendations from Cisco the numbers are as below:

• 2000 vEdges per vBond but take at least 1-2 vBond for redundancy
• 2700 vEdges per vSmart but take at least 1-2 vBond for redundancy

So the above number shows that the maximum limited per vBond is to have 1000 sites where we consider 2 vEdges/site. Similarly the maximum limited per vSmart is to have 1350 sites where we consider 2 vEdges/site. Our recommendation is to take 2 vBond and 2 vSmart for redundancy purposes as well.

Physical & Virtual Appliances: 

There are number of devices which can be used as vEdges/cEdges to support Cisco Viptela SDWAN fabric. These devices can be physical or virtual appliances and used as per the bandwidth requirement on the location which can be a remote/branch/hub/datacenter sites.

• vEdge 100: Bandwidth support up to 100 Mbps
• vEdge 1000: Bandwidth support up to 1 Gbps
• vEdge 2000: Bandwidth support up to 10 Gbps
• vEdge Cloud: Bandwidth support up to 100 Mbps
• Cisco ISR 800: Bandwidth support up to 100 Mbps
• Cisco ISR 1000: Bandwidth support up to 100 Mbps
• Cisco ISR 4000: Bandwidth support up to 2 Gbps
• Cisco ASR 1000: Bandwidth support up to 20 Gbps
• Cisco CSR 1000v: Bandwidth support up to 10 Gbps