Megaport Virtual Edge & Cisco Viptela SD-WAN

You may heard about the integration of Cisco SDWAN with Megaport solution and thinking of what this Megaport services are. Well we will discuss about the Megaport and the services they provide 

Megaport helps to deploy private point-to-point connectivity between any of the locations on Megaport’s global network infrastructure and manages this network through Software Defined Networking (SDN). 

So the basic services of the Megaport is to create point-to-point connections between any of your own locations or to a connected Cloud Service Provider (CSP). I would say for point to point connections you already have the providers who provide MPLS and VPLS or Ethernet connections across the different locations, So what's the new ?

Fig 1.1- Cisco Viptela SDWAN and Megaport

As you may know that Megaport is a SDN provider network and is managed through software, so we can set up a new connection or change an existing connection in less than a minute, Well not possible with MPLS/VPLS connections, right ? You can deploy and manage services through the Megaport Portal or API.

Connection with Megaport
The main thing here is to setup a connection with the Megaport via Port or MCR (Megaport Cloud router). I see many organizations are working with Megaport to setup a connection point to point towards cloud service provider like Amazon, Google or so on..

I will talk about the core network of Megaport in another article but in short i would like to talk about the location types you may required to get connected with the Megaport services and these locations types are Installed or Extended. The Installed where Megaport uses their Hardware equipment and connected via portal while in extended, you can access it through a private intra-campus or intra-metro cross connect.

Cisco Viptela SDWAN with Megaport 
The Cisco SD-WAN fabric acts as the overlay, and the Megaport SDN acts as the underlay. Megaport Virtual Edge requires Cisco’s vManage management console running version 20.5. Cisco SD-WAN creates the private overlay network and manages the network connections and network policies. 

The vManage management console is used to create and order the MVE and create and manage the virtual cross connects (VXCs) to the cloud onramps and other services in the Megaport SDN. 

To initiate the SDWAN with Megaport, you need to enable two things here, creating an MVE in vManage and creating a VXC to an MVE Integrated with Cisco SD-WAN and at last connecting MVEs Integrated with Cisco SD-WAN

Creating MVE
Cisco vManage console uses Megaport API calls to synchronize and authenticate the MVE, To enable MVE you need to attach the Megaport template. Once attached the template of the Megaport, we need to configure Cloud OnRamp for Multi-Cloud and then choose Interconnect tab, further Associate Interconnect Account( select Megaport as interconnect provider).

Now go to Interconnect Global Settings and click Edit. Select all the relevant parameters and update the tab. Once the MVE is provisioned with an Active status, the next step is to create Virtual Cross Connects (VXCs) to connect the Megaport backbone to other MVEs or cloud service providers.

Creating VXC's
A VXC is an important to have private point-to-point Ethernet connection between an one Source location to other destination location. You can connect up to 24 VXCs on a single MVE. Make sure you know that VXC is created on the Megaport portal.

Once you select the type of the connection and choose cloud option as destination, you will further get the option to configure for the Cloud Service providers like AWS, AZURE, Google. In this way the VXC will be created between your source location and the destination which is a cloud location on AWS/Azure/Google. 

Last step is to connect MVE to MVE
In vManage, you can create a VXC between MVEs at two or more Megaport locations. The VXC links the SD-WAN branch locations connected to these MVEs via the Megaport fabric.