Is it even worth it to begin on CCNA now? I keep seeing this SDN non-CLI stuff and the networking tech seems like its moving forward fast... its got me thinking the traditional CCNA skills are going to get pushed away? Idk Im sure Im overthinking this but it is a worry I have. Like would it be better to focus on security or something else?
I'm a new CCNA but I'm sure we'll be alright. Not every company is going to be a large enterprise running the biggest baddest technology. Keep your head up and push forward.
You will still need to know how switching and routing works, which the CCNA covers. SDN isnt mainstream yet and knowing it now is still considered a bonus and not a necessity. But if want to be ahead of the rest, you can get into SDN.
Man, we had velocloud come to our company for sdwan training and I can say I learned more from this video than the two days with velocloud. Great content.
Love your conent, Chuck. We are still in an over 6-month roll-out of SD-WAN, I work for a large multinational company with 10's of thousands of devices, we are still using some MPLS, but the SD-WAN is some cool stuff, I can already see a big difference.
So I work for a IT company, but not in the engineering dept, so though Ive heard a few familiar terms/phrases, that whole world is foreign to me. Im 2 min in to this vid, and Im mad impressed with how you explain things and no lies, I learned a lot from this vid. great job bro
Another great video Chuck! I just love how you take a complex subject and make it interesting and easy to understand. Every time I watch one of your videos you always re-kindle my networking passion and push me to study harder!
I'm studying for my CCENT currently and really enjoyed this video, love how you break it down and the passion in your voice about this new technology. Some people will be boring in describing it then I lose interest. You channel is awesome bro, keep making great vids like this. I hope to be on your level soon starting with this damn CCENT. God Bless!
I work at a satellite branch for a Creative Arts college in Atlanta, Georgia that has 4 other satellite branch locations around the world. My Branch lost its Network Admin engineer last year around this time. My official title is Technology Specialist, I do some of everything at the college branch that work at. It's a little bit of Helpdesk, a little bit of Break / Fix, a little bit of remote tech, MDM solutions really everything under the sun. We just make sure that all the tech for the college works for the students and for our VP's. As I said before, we lost our Network Admin engineer last year around this time. At the time we thought that the college would find a replacement, but after a year of searching this Network Admin engineer position has gone unfilled. Most of the Network Admin engineer duties have been pushed onto me and the other Technology Specialist. Between the both of us we have been trying to keep our branch network up and running but over the course of the year our network has gone down 3 times. Each time the network has gone down, we have been lucky enough to get it back up and running. I've been watching your youtube channel for the past year to maybe glean some insight into the dark art of networking. I've been thinking about getting some sort of networking cert under my belt. What would you suggest I get, CompTIA Network +, CCNA, or CCNP?
Velocloud is phenomenal. Viptella not so much. When Cisco bought Meraki they were doing so bec it was IT made simple. With Viptella its the opposite. Ask anyone whos actually tried implementing it how easy it is to stand up and if it truly has all the spog features that are touted.
Amazing watching this in December with no experience, the night before going for my interview at an ISP, then watching it again 7 months later as a Network Support Engineer. Thank you for sharing dude :)
This cracks me up. SD-WAN! SD-WAN! We had almost all of this 15 years ago with Juniper NSM. We shipped the Juniper FW to the new remote store, plugged in the cable modem to the router, in thirty minutes, they could reach anything anywhere. Full mesh VPN with QOS and other goodies. SD-WAN simply equals an orchestration and management platform for all of your edge devices. If Cisco really wants to impress, I want to see a platform that auto-discovers assets, lets me draw lines between endpoints, add a few specifics, and then enables the comms I just drew. We should be long past the days of touching a switch/router unless it's broken.
Basically it is an Automation, centralized dashboard to monitor, configure, analyze your network, you will get most of the services & features in a single bucket.
This should be the top comment! Kept hearing about it, finally decided it might be actually new so I clicked this video. Man, the only people who think technology moves fast never understood it in the first place.
Thanks for this great video! I oversee a 5000+ site MPLS network for a ISP/MSP. We started rolling out SD-WAN with Velocloud recently and my client is turning up four test locations soon. I've wanted to get my hands dirty with SD-WAN for a while so it's pretty exciting! We've been moving a lot of sites to IPsec recently and some of the routing tables have become enormous. I can see how completely removing the control plane from the router will be an advantage here. Just bridging my modem at home and moving the routing duties alone to a separate router increases performance dramatically, so it makes even more sense in the Enterprise network. I've heard of SD-WAN having issues contending with circuits taking packet loss. I wonder how the Cisco implemention handles this, especially when there is no latency. I love the idea of load balancing at the application layer. LTE wreaks havoc on VoIP at random with jitter, latency, and dropped SIP MGMT frames, however it can have very good throughput. Another problem is many remote sites have a low bandwidth circuit that bottlenecks their other applications. Having the ability to assign applications to the connection that suits them would solve both of these problems. We would no longer have to constantly explain that we can't control the cell reception in the building, or the congestion of the tower, or the inherent lower bandwidth of their other circuit. It would all just work, theoretically. The Cisco implementation, as usual, seems quite advanced. I am curious to see how similar our implentation is. I can't believe I heard someone from Cisco recommend against the CLI! 😱 Blasphemy! Very interesting time for network technologies!
my company has been rolling out a SDWAN solution (not cisco but a top competitor). It is pretty neat, and a lot of our "problem" locations have stopped complaining after making the switch. it sounds like all the sdwan providers hit the same features Chuck described like load balancing, fail over, ease of scaling etc. One thing to note is this is still new, and no one has a perfect solution. There are bugs to be found. Sometimes stuff acts weird and i find myself wishing i was dealing with a plain old Cisco CLI & router. There's still a CLI running under the gui that can spit out wayyy more information. Think about it on windows.. you can go into the control panel (gui) and dig through settings for your ip address, or you and open cmd and type ipconfig. I see a bunch of comments questioning cisco certs. The certs still teach you core fundamentals of networking, and protocols that are still very much in play with SDWAN.
shoe the maker Agreed bud.. our company is going with Verizon.. rollout in Feb can’t wait.. dynamic load balancing is what I’m looking forward to. For people out there looking to do Cisco certs , keep pursuing that cuz you still basic concepts to implement SD-WAN
Not the end of MPLS, SD-WAN will just add a management layer on top of it. As someone mentioned you can not rely on an internet based service if you need guarantees on availability, latency, jitter etc
EXACTLY Tim, SD WAN is just another financial mouth to feed and not really a justifiable ROI, not to mention more wiz bang widgets to fail that are not really any value add compared to a 'properly' designed and configured classic network
Agree; MPLS is still relevant, but SD-WAN certainly puts pressure on the incumbent providers. Still, if your locations support multiple providers (cable, fiber, cellular, satellite) it becomes much easier to justify saying “hasta la vista baby” to MPLS
Not necessarily. It depends on the implementation. QoS is not honored on a public Internet underlay, but with the right provider's solution, you can get an SLA with 99.999% or 100% availability when the design includes proper hardware redundancy and circuit diversity.
Most businesses will move towards whatever will save them money, regardless if MPLS is still better. With SD-WAN it can reduce a company's OPEX budget by 60+%
SD-WAN and Viptela/Cisco really helped scale private cloud deployment. As the network evolves from connectivity to services to "federations" of ad hoc connections to share proprietary data between businesses this super, scalable, control plane capability becomes the key and "trust", authentication and peer to peer encryption (based on whatever criteria) becomes essential. Very nicely done.
I ended up here because the company I work for is migrating to this and I wanted to learn more. We have at least over 100 sites around the world and this is sounding really promising. Thanks!
It was kinda hard for me at first to grasp the concept of SDWAN....but thanks to Cisco for providing a way to lab this thing....I now have SDWAN configured in my VMware environment and I can't get enough of SDWAN..🙂
Our organisation is testing our the SDWAN in a mini lab planning to do a full deployment. You have described our currenty network environment 100% from remote locations to office 365. Thanks for the video
Customer: "we're looking at using Network Insights" “oh cool - is that like Tetration?" Customer: "no, no different product this is Network Insights" “awesome - is that the same as AppDynamics" Customer: “no! it's Network Insights - very different" “is that like DNA and SDA?" Customer: "no, no .. that's Campus stuff" “ahh weird, we haven't seen this NAE in the market at all. Is that like ACI?" Customer: "no, ... it's Network Assurance Engine it plugs into DCNM" “hmm, why would you use DCNM and not ACI?" Customer: "well we looked at ACI, but it was too complicated" “hmm .. so you're going to use their Junior Varsity product instead ... why wouldn't they integrate NAE into DCNM or ACI? Isn't DCNM the same as Prime?" Customer: "no, no Prime is dead. but DCNM is different" “so if you use DCNM and NAE, would they still try to sell you Tetration and AppDynamics?" Customer: "yes, they will" So you got all these different products, all subscription licenses, different OS's, bolt-on's to existing products, multiple overlapping products, different support teams ... who is really winning here? Product Soup
AAR (Application Aware Routing) polices will steer the traffic. I suggest that you use something like a inline packet storm appliance to get the performance metrics for each application. The packet storm appliance will inject packet loss, latency and jitter over a given ckt. With the metric collected by the packet storm appliance you can tune your AAR policies. I hope this helped. Great video :-)
this video just blow up my mind, I know how to work over cisco devices know about networking but this, this is another level thank you so much for share your knowladge.
We started to use SDWAN here from Citrix. I only can say that kind of tech is amazing. We have all of our branches running over SDWAN. It's like magic, man.
In 2022, I still prefer the CLI for Cisco products. I was setting up a FirePower1120 series and VPN wouldn’t work until I went to CLI to run certain commands. Meraki works well as a GUI, but Cisco needs to step it up on GUI even if I personally prefer CLI. For Catalyst switches, I stay away from GUI. Hopefully they got it right on the SDWAN side, but reading the comment above seems like they have more work to do. Dell and Netgear M4300 have better GUI where you really don’t need to mess with the CLI.
I work as a presales consultant for big MSP (one of market top players) and customers very often come and think SD-WAN solves all their pains and helps them to reduce costs by 10, 20, 50%. I have to admint that SD-WAN is very big improvement (especially automation and simplification of deployment), but at the end it as good as its underlay network and therefore at least for business critical applications MPLS will stay in place. By the way we deploy Cisco SD-WAN and trust me, it's not that stable and reliable as Cisco is trying to bullshit you. Therefore definitely don't trust Cisco saying you can abandon MPLS and move to the Internet only network for all your locations.
we have deployed ARUBA SD-WAN solution in our environment, which is replacing a decade old technology. we have successfully deployed this solution on 11000 sites, 3500 more to go. yes I said 14500+ sites.
I started working for a local Wireless ISP at the beginning of this year and we're starting to investigate SD-WAN solutions to implement into our network. Even for the small ISP network we've built, it's growing fast and we're trying to find ways to manage the transition as seamlessly as we can.
I chose to get into networking 6 months ago and I'm taking my CCENT in one week, your videos terrify me that I may have made the wrong decision! I feel like the stuff I've been learning is ancient at this point.
Nate Bader take the exam. SDN will not supersede IP/MPLS within this decade. You still going to need the knowledge you will be gaining from the Cisco Routing and Switching Curriculum for you to be able to understand SDN. Im planning on taking the CCIE Routing and Switching within 2 years as it is still valuable in the market.
Nice session. Company I am working with now starting deployment of SDWan with approximately 14000 routers (800 Series) to replace. Should be interesting.
Great explanation! Probably the best out there. I was recently introduced to SDwan myself.. If I put my CIO risk management hat on and I'm sitting in front of a CFO who's asking hard questions; I'll choose MPLS for voice. Why? I like my time off.. I hate voice quality issues more than I love new tech. This is a risk management argument I'll bring to the table every time. You're basically outsourcing your routing. Same thing you're doing with MPLS but without the support horsepower of the ISP.. Whats your voice quality worth? Put a price on it. I'm currently deploying a SDwan solution, from a startup vendor, for a large client. We're moving away from ISR's sharing BGP info with the MPLS provider and have ASA's with a fail over IPsec/GRE tunnels to the head ISR/ASA... It's breaking my heart.. It really is. Primarily because it works and we have 0 voice quality issues. SDwan might be 'simple' but it's only as good as your plan to migrate and as good as the knowledge level of the folks deploying it. If they don't understand basic routing and networking; if they're not good listeners and their method of deployment is rigid; it's like talking tech with my greyhound. Actually, taking tech with my dogs is a LOT more enjoyable. I fear this SDWAN stuff might be allowing some of us to forget how to be 'elastic' and confine us to the rules that these devices set, like 'inside the box' thinking.. Sure, SDwan is all these things sounds great in a sales meeting but my experience delivering this vendors SDwan solution has been pretty awful. I haven't even seen it work yet.. but if their deployment plan is any indication, it's going to be a total s%^ show once it goes live. I hear a lot of sales subterfuge AKA- double-talk.. AKA-- BULL-S^&* So I'm not dogging SDwan, but I can't stress enough; SDwan doesn't change physics.. The basic rules of networking still apply. Planning still applies, maybe even more so.. Don't get caught up in all the hype.. You still need to be firmly rooted in network basics..
ya know its funny, we've had arguments about that with a hard headed CIOs and VPs before that would tear a strip off us when voice quality got the tinest bit of messed up. Now its move everything out, even Voice as a Service and now there is no conern for quality, like WTF?? MPLS is solid, it works. Now everyone is drinking from the same punch bowl and want to move services out of their datacenters, but in order in offer the same quality to these services, the network overhaul has to happen. I dunno, somewhere between TCO and ROI, not sure if this all add up yet.
I would rather sit inside the lav in an airplane on a 10 hour trip to somewhere really unpleasant, than do a SDwan deployment like the one I just did, again. Awful Experience..
It's so funny to see Cisco play catch up (and I am Cisco certified) on many newer network technologies. Having to acquire Viptela to get into the SD-WAN game was a late move. We implemented transparent SD-WAN 2 years ago, and finished it over a year ago across 400 sites. Little need for BGP routing now either, as we have VPN's going from each branch to each data center, and to our cloud services, all transparent to the apps, and routing is pretty much throw it out the gateway and let the SD-WAN figure out the best circuit, and route depending on type of traffic, destination, and circuit characteristics, all on the fly. While there will always be a need for advanced routing protocols on the backbone networks that tranport VPN's, Virtual circuits, and and SD-WAN traffic, there is going to continue to be less and less need within corporations that are not transport providers, unless they have truly massive sites.
so true. In service providers networks they will still running mpls because it´s benefits of label switching, free bgp core, path selection and so on. It's a very solid protocol that works very very well with any other L2 and L3 protocols, specially with IP. but in customers network they definitively will migrate to SD-WAN for it's lower costs and for the custom traffic control that it provides.
huge thanks for these updates, Chuck Keith Sir! we really need bits of updates such as these from this side of the tech industry to keep us informed without having to go into the very details of them as we already have a heap of other things on our plate already. just enough to keep us updated. keep 'em coming Sir. thanks again!
Here is the thing, MPLS is still going to be used, even with more and more companies using SD-WAN. There are still needs for low time convergance, traffic engineering, and *niche applications*.
I think you should look into Fortinet and their products. I'm taking a cyber security education right now and it's mostly Fortinet, which has around 40+% of Sweden's market share of firewalls, while Cisco only has around 10%. Their products, especially their Security Fabric and their FortiGate (firewall) with a lot of management in a single-pane-of-glass etc. They are very underrated! Would love to see more videos about them :)
A lot of the features you were taking about sound like the Cisco Meraki service it update a few days ago. It changed it's security section to "Security & SD-WAN". The fundamentals of SD-WAN have been in application for quite some time now. It seems like Cisco is now referring it's WAN security as SD-WAN. Sights of things to come.
This is a great video! One of the only things that I found that actually gives a Sufficient explanation of what SD-WAN is without getting too dry with all the bolts underneath. I have not used Cisco’s Viptela solution, however, I have a 40+ site deployment of SD-WAN using Talari Networks, and did PoC with SilverPeak & Meraki as well. It’s unreal how much better SD-WAN is than traditional WAN connectivity! So much better that it Actually makes it difficult to sell engineers on it sometimes because it sounds too good to be true. You do still face performance challenge is over the WAN with these types of solutions, but the approach to solving them is much simpler I definitely encourage everyone to look at SD-WAN Solutions or any networked topology that spans multiple locations regardless of the quantity, as you can typically bring a FAR superior SLA to your organization/customers while simultaneously saving a significant amount of money. (Say what?!) Chuck (or anyone for that matter), I am always delighted to have discussions surrounding these technologies. Feel free to reach out! /Evan
Hi Chuck- nice review. Cisco is following Sophos RED (Remote Ethernet Device) example . This is the future - hands free no CLI site-to-site connectivity.
hey I'm studying for my ICND 2 and this just made what I am studying obsolete, what the Heck Chuck. this was still good stuff to know and I'm just giving you a hard time so don't take it in the wrong way.....
I just came across your channel and it's exceptionally informative and very well done. However I do want to say that in your video your beard looks amazing! It's so shiny and healthy looking, would you mind sharing what products you use to care for your beard? 😃
That second phone behind you, the one on the right, looks like the same Cisco ones we have at work. The one above it looks like the ones we had before it. I'm not very knowledgeable of voip stuff (never had to manage it), also I love to hate on Cisco but the new ones are so much better, they sound a thousand times better than the old ones, especially on the speaker. The display is nice too, but I have some nitpicks with the interface. Sometimes I just sit there and listen to our phone bots talk and just appreciate how good it sounds.
So.... pretty much Cisco Meraki? Except with ISRs? We deployed a Cisco Meraki network with 84 branches :) We jokingly said it was poor man's MPLS... Same features you spoke about, unbelievable network management such as failover, wan load balancing, auto VPN, almost auto deployment and network insights on a whole new level. About to write my CCNA R/S and still pursuing my CCIE R/S... Don't ever think that studying any Cisco cert won't have a clear, well thought out upgrade path through Cisco when this eventually becomes ubiquitous :) Great video, almost as much energy as I have about networking on a daily basis :)
Great explanations Chuck, its almost like you're a trainer or something.....hehe Thanks for the great content looking forward to future SD-WAN Videos on here or hopefully....someday.....my CBT Nuggets account.
SD WAN is very promising and cool. But This Cisco/Viptela analogy of SDN and SD WAN is misleading since is not explaining the core differences (which are significant). There is a giant Gap between Overlay orchestration concept of SD WAN, versus SDN which is indeed a true decoupling of the control Plane and the forwading Plane. OMP is not the Control Plane interface of the Router. It feeds route information to all routers from a central place (= some input to update RIBs). It is some type of Dynamic routing protocol. But it doesn't waive that much stress on the router, which still has to map frame/Packet/session to a RIB and start a look up in the FIB. The FIB is still controlled by the Router OS. SD WAN is mostly about, central Management Plane, some decoupling of "central" Control Plane to CPE Control Plane (pre processing & optimization of the RIB). An SD WAN Router OS has actually a lot more processes to manage than traditional router OS ever before (Classification + Flow monitoring reports #of tunnels). Rules are just better orchestrated, for global deployement and "edge" CPU (a lot) more powerful. Technically, SDN is allowing you to decouple the OS of the Network Device, so an OpenFlow / SDN switch is all you need.
Good point. This is just a shill marketing bullshit for the network engineer newbies that dont know any better. Classic networking isn't going anywhere soon.
Indeed a lot of marketing drives SD-WAN forward, which is its biggest problem. Customers expect that SD-WAN solves all their problems while allows them to lower TCO. It's not entirely true especially because of expensive licensing model (at least for SD-WAN by Cisco).
Software Defined Wide Area Networking. When it was first introduced to me, it was decided not to introduce it to system admins or network tech's, only to programming stream students by the training organisation I was attending at the time. I'm glad I did SDN regardless,! We realised in seconds that it was going to be a game changer for networking!
I just got hired at CBTS in Cincinnati for TriHealth. They have close to 200 sites. All except 5% of those sites are small doctors offices. This would be a awesome thing to upgrade to. I'm sure we're talking millions of dollars to do this.
Would I be able to use a current Cisco 4321 as I see that is a feasible router or would I need a whole separate router with the software on it to work?
Our requirement for low latency, jitter, etc. between offices disappeared. It was primarily for an old VOIP system. It HURT paying for MPLS for those sites until our contract was over. We just have basic IPSEC VPNs between locations now. There's a fiber line and a cable/FiOS/fixed wireless backup with failover. So much cheaper and we can change whatever we need whenever we need. I'm only dealing with 15 sites though, and our methods will only scale to a point. I also have to do cutover manually if a circuit isn't down completely. I wish I could get funding for something like this, but we're cheap.
The problem with SD-WAN that no one here seems to be talking about is lack of visibility and what happens when things break. For technical issues that take longer than a couple minutes to fix, you have to call the vendor, and you're at their mercy. I literally had this feedback from a customer I was visiting. I can see why Cisco sponsored this. This dude is on some hardcore kool aide. xD
I work for a telco and ISP and we manage a mix of vendors SDN/SDWAN products over cable broadband, ethernet, fixed microwave, and LTE, via public internet or private L3VPN with ~25K nodes total and growing fast. VeloCloud and Meraki are the bulk of them. Our largest single tenant network is around 4K sites on SDWAN with HA standbys so 8K boxes with tens of thousands of routes in one VRF/Segment. The SDWAN buzzword is just a focused use of open source SDN technology to address the specific roles and issues WAN links have. Networking essentials are the same even when they hide things under a pretty webpage. Its rare we have to use the CLI unless we are working with the developers testing code or Linux patches because it, VM/containers, and python live in most of these new devices under the hood so understanding those things is helpful. We can quickly add capacity because we just spin up more VMs for as many orchestrators and cloud gateways we need. Customer migration is easy because we connect the SDWAN cloud gateways to the existing MPLS VRF/BGP instance if they have one like it's just another PE. The SDWAN gateways redistribute the MPLS BGP routes into their protocol inside the 'cloud' and advertises cloud routes back into BGP for the MPLS based users to hear like any other remote site on the MPLS. The edges can also redistribute OSPF or BGP and translate the routes if there is a onsite router that needs those beyond the SDWAN edge's LAN side. We have customers that have select sites on SDWAN with their data centers and other cloud provider NNIs tied to MPLS circuits all working together nicely in the same L3VPN. Seasonal retailers that setup those holiday mini location tents in malls or popup tax offices love them because they can plug in whatever bandwidth they can get on short notice and it just works if whatever they plug in has public internet access and their user traffic is VPN secured. The boxes usually have enough ports to connect everything without a switch in smaller installs. The biggest thing customers have hang-ups with when going SDN is the design considerations of the underlay/overlay model with separate data and control planes and that these boxes are not normal routers that do things the way they are used to. While they provide routing and switching services and some features like DHCP they operate more like a server that likes to be ran via API. SDN is awesome because it solves many problems at the same time. Intent based networking orchestrated by the design in a single source of truth which can also generate your network diagrams and provide the monitoring dashboard. The API lets you make bulk config changes or automatically provision networks like a data center does server tenants from your ordering system. With SDN you get much more granular control of the traffic to layer 7 if you want so bandwidth usage is more efficient. It's also secure end to end because everything is in a VPN tunnel with VxLANs inside. Failover is pretty awesome when you can lose a WAN link and no one except the NOC notices unless the other circuit is dramatically slower. Why pay for a backup circuits that get little usage except in failover unless you come up with some overly complex policy routing that is a pain to load balance and manage in scale. Pings and voip calls never drop in a single WAN failure on some SDWAN systems even tough the circuits are from separate ISPs that have no idea you are basically multihoming via VPN. Each WAN link carries VPN tunnels back to the gateways to your 'cloud' or each other directly if you want to allow edge meshing or can force everyone to go through a hub gateway. Config management and system patch deployment is built in and automated. I don't have to hope a box was configured properly or have to be updated in the field because the design changed after it shipped. The box gets the latest OS image, config, and security stuff installed when it phones home to activate across a secure tunnel. The box ships factory default so no one can spy my stuff in transit so my PCI/HIPAA regulation sensitive customers are happy.
The vSmart capabilities start to make those fail over circuits more cost effective since you can start offloading some traffic to them. This gives a lot more bang for the buck, especially as you scale to a larger number of sites in the network. This is an incredible change when presenting to executives and will fundamentally alter ROI Calculations for implementations of such technology in the Enterprise. This sort of technology could conceivably start producing an ROI within just a few months of implementation.
Isn't everything Cisco vendor lock-in? We typically utilize lesser-known services with a backup plan should they go defunct, etc. Most software works whether folks are in business or not (unless you are dependent on their backend. WE DO NOT DO THIS.)
MPLS is kind of a primary on most SD-WAN's we see and do. It is an overlay on the MPLS and the Internet. Velo, Citrix-Netscaler, Nuage Networks/Nokia are the other big players that do this very well.
I just started a new job as a network engineer working for a Dairy company, and let me tell you, they are still using SUPER dated Cisco gear (I'm talking ASA 5505 firewalls and old Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches), and they are still managing and t-shooting networks through the CLI, mostly due to the fact that they don't have the budget or the need to upgrade to the latest and greatest networking tech. They are still using MPLS which has a TON of issues mostly because they don't implement redundancy, but i agree with what is being said here Network Programmability is the way of the future, so i definitely recommend everyone to learn Python. But first get your CCNA and get your foot in the door and get some real world networking experience and then learn programming to complement your networking skills. This is the shit they don't teach you in school, the learning never stops in Networking once you finish school, you are constantly having to stay up to date in this field.
Is it even worth it to begin on CCNA now? I keep seeing this SDN non-CLI stuff and the networking tech seems like its moving forward fast... its got me thinking the traditional CCNA skills are going to get pushed away? Idk Im sure Im overthinking this but it is a worry I have. Like would it be better to focus on security or something else?
I was just thinking the same thing. I just got my CCNA this past Friday, now i'm wondering if I just wasted my time.
I just did my network+ and havent even started on ccna yet
I'm a new CCNA but I'm sure we'll be alright. Not every company is going to be a large enterprise running the biggest baddest technology. Keep your head up and push forward.
The fundamentals still apply and the CCNA/NP/IE assist in providing this. Add in a programming language like Python (which is what I'm getting into).
You will still need to know how switching and routing works, which the CCNA covers. SDN isnt mainstream yet and knowing it now is still considered a bonus and not a necessity. But if want to be ahead of the rest, you can get into SDN.
I just implemented a large Viptella solution across 80 sites, I can assure you... You will be in the cmd line 90% of the time!
1000% correct.
@@NathanielScriven probably using that wrong! ^^
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Also The API is not restful and you will need convoluted login/logout just to get metrics periodically.
I've always tried to understand the SD-WAN viptela Cisco solution. This video was very enlightening and extremely easy to understand. Great work NC!
Man, we had velocloud come to our company for sdwan training and I can say I learned more from this video than the two days with velocloud. Great content.
Thank you!
Love your conent, Chuck. We are still in an over 6-month roll-out of SD-WAN, I work for a large multinational company with 10's of thousands of devices, we are still using some MPLS, but the SD-WAN is some cool stuff, I can already see a big difference.
I passed my CCENT Today Big thanks to you Chuck for the motivation!
Congrats. I take ccent it on the 27th.. I am so nervous and excited at the same time.
Gratz! I'm testing at the start of December...
@@larsonberggren8600 good luck i wish you the best
@@FacePlant1324 grats
Great news! I just pass my icnd2 today too! Much harder...somewhat. good luck on ur journey!
So I work for a IT company, but not in the engineering dept, so though Ive heard a few familiar terms/phrases, that whole world is foreign to me. Im 2 min in to this vid, and Im mad impressed with how you explain things and no lies, I learned a lot from this vid. great job bro
Another great video Chuck! I just love how you take a complex subject and make it interesting and easy to understand. Every time I watch one of your videos you always re-kindle my networking passion and push me to study harder!
I'm studying for my CCENT currently and really enjoyed this video, love how you break it down and the passion in your voice about this new technology. Some people will be boring in describing it then I lose interest. You channel is awesome bro, keep making great vids like this. I hope to be on your level soon starting with this damn CCENT. God Bless!
I work at a satellite branch for a Creative Arts college in Atlanta, Georgia that has 4 other satellite branch locations around the world. My Branch lost its Network Admin engineer last year around this time. My official title is Technology Specialist, I do some of everything at the college branch that work at. It's a little bit of Helpdesk, a little bit of Break / Fix, a little bit of remote tech, MDM solutions really everything under the sun. We just make sure that all the tech for the college works for the students and for our VP's. As I said before, we lost our Network Admin engineer last year around this time. At the time we thought that the college would find a replacement, but after a year of searching this Network Admin engineer position has gone unfilled. Most of the Network Admin engineer duties have been pushed onto me and the other Technology Specialist. Between the both of us we have been trying to keep our branch network up and running but over the course of the year our network has gone down 3 times. Each time the network has gone down, we have been lucky enough to get it back up and running. I've been watching your youtube channel for the past year to maybe glean some insight into the dark art of networking. I've been thinking about getting some sort of networking cert under my belt. What would you suggest I get, CompTIA Network +, CCNA, or CCNP?
My company is deploying a lot of Veloclouds for our customers. I’m very interested in learning Cisco’s SD-WAN. Thanks for the video.
Make sure you talk to anybody that has experience of Viptella first.
Velocloud is phenomenal. Viptella not so much. When Cisco bought Meraki they were doing so bec it was IT made simple. With Viptella its the opposite. Ask anyone whos actually tried implementing it how easy it is to stand up and if it truly has all the spog features that are touted.
a part of me wanted you to start this video with : "HEY vSmart, Chuck here.. What is SD-WAN?"
Amazing watching this in December with no experience, the night before going for my interview at an ISP, then watching it again 7 months later as a Network Support Engineer. Thank you for sharing dude :)
The best video on TH-cam as of now to understand what exactly is SDWAN solution 👍
I’m experienced with Cisco and security, but new to SDWAN. This was perfectly explained, engaging, and the examples were spot on. Thank you!
This cracks me up. SD-WAN! SD-WAN!
We had almost all of this 15 years ago with Juniper NSM. We shipped the Juniper FW to the new remote store, plugged in the cable modem to the router, in thirty minutes, they could reach anything anywhere. Full mesh VPN with QOS and other goodies.
SD-WAN simply equals an orchestration and management platform for all of your edge devices.
If Cisco really wants to impress, I want to see a platform that auto-discovers assets, lets me draw lines between endpoints, add a few specifics, and then enables the comms I just drew. We should be long past the days of touching a switch/router unless it's broken.
Any half way decently trained tech should be able to fault find a network fault without going near a switch or router.
First rule of SDWAN club, don't tell what SDWAN is! 20 minutes to tell about ipsec with centralised route management
Haha, I like that.
Basically it is an Automation, centralized dashboard to monitor, configure, analyze your network, you will get most of the services & features in a single bucket.
ohhh... I just got here. So it is just ipsec connected to management
This should be the top comment! Kept hearing about it, finally decided it might be actually new so I clicked this video.
Man, the only people who think technology moves fast never understood it in the first place.
Thanks for this great video!
I oversee a 5000+ site MPLS network for a ISP/MSP. We started rolling out SD-WAN with Velocloud recently and my client is turning up four test locations soon. I've wanted to get my hands dirty with SD-WAN for a while so it's pretty exciting!
We've been moving a lot of sites to IPsec recently and some of the routing tables have become enormous. I can see how completely removing the control plane from the router will be an advantage here. Just bridging my modem at home and moving the routing duties alone to a separate router increases performance dramatically, so it makes even more sense in the Enterprise network.
I've heard of SD-WAN having issues contending with circuits taking packet loss. I wonder how the Cisco implemention handles this, especially when there is no latency.
I love the idea of load balancing at the application layer. LTE wreaks havoc on VoIP at random with jitter, latency, and dropped SIP MGMT frames, however it can have very good throughput. Another problem is many remote sites have a low bandwidth circuit that bottlenecks their other applications.
Having the ability to assign applications to the connection that suits them would solve both of these problems. We would no longer have to constantly explain that we can't control the cell reception in the building, or the congestion of the tower, or the inherent lower bandwidth of their other circuit. It would all just work, theoretically.
The Cisco implementation, as usual, seems quite advanced. I am curious to see how similar our implentation is.
I can't believe I heard someone from Cisco recommend against the CLI! 😱
Blasphemy!
Very interesting time for network technologies!
my company has been rolling out a SDWAN solution (not cisco but a top competitor). It is pretty neat, and a lot of our "problem" locations have stopped complaining after making the switch. it sounds like all the sdwan providers hit the same features Chuck described like load balancing, fail over, ease of scaling etc.
One thing to note is this is still new, and no one has a perfect solution. There are bugs to be found. Sometimes stuff acts weird and i find myself wishing i was dealing with a plain old Cisco CLI & router. There's still a CLI running under the gui that can spit out wayyy more information. Think about it on windows.. you can go into the control panel (gui) and dig through settings for your ip address, or you and open cmd and type ipconfig.
I see a bunch of comments questioning cisco certs. The certs still teach you core fundamentals of networking, and protocols that are still very much in play with SDWAN.
SDWAN is not that new...other competitors have had it for awhile now...
shoe the maker Agreed bud.. our company is going with Verizon.. rollout in Feb can’t wait.. dynamic load balancing is what I’m looking forward to. For people out there looking to do Cisco certs , keep pursuing that cuz you still basic concepts to implement SD-WAN
Not the end of MPLS, SD-WAN will just add a management layer on top of it. As someone mentioned you can not rely on an internet based service if you need guarantees on availability, latency, jitter etc
EXACTLY Tim, SD WAN is just another financial mouth to feed and not really a justifiable ROI, not to mention more wiz bang widgets to fail that are not really any value add compared to a 'properly' designed and configured classic network
Agree; MPLS is still relevant, but SD-WAN certainly puts pressure on the incumbent providers. Still, if your locations support multiple providers (cable, fiber, cellular, satellite) it becomes much easier to justify saying “hasta la vista baby” to MPLS
Not necessarily. It depends on the implementation. QoS is not honored on a public Internet underlay, but with the right provider's solution, you can get an SLA with 99.999% or 100% availability when the design includes proper hardware redundancy and circuit diversity.
Most businesses will move towards whatever will save them money, regardless if MPLS is still better. With SD-WAN it can reduce a company's OPEX budget by 60+%
Agreed, MPLS has uses that will still be relevant. Like Traffic engineering
SD-WAN and Viptela/Cisco really helped scale private cloud deployment. As the network evolves from connectivity to services to "federations" of ad hoc connections to share proprietary data between businesses this super, scalable, control plane capability becomes the key and "trust", authentication and peer to peer encryption (based on whatever criteria) becomes essential. Very nicely done.
I ended up here because the company I work for is migrating to this and I wanted to learn more. We have at least over 100 sites around the world and this is sounding really promising. Thanks!
Very nice presentation! You have the gift of presenting difficult technologies in a simple way. Well done.
It was kinda hard for me at first to grasp the concept of SDWAN....but thanks to Cisco for providing a way to lab this thing....I now have SDWAN configured in my VMware environment and I can't get enough of SDWAN..🙂
Sounds like after I implement this I can just go ahead and fire myself?
hahaha
for sure :)
Yeah, maybe but first time there is a network problem your phone will be ringing for sure.
@@urbansubnet7753 As long as he's working for CISCO Tech Support! Haaa
basically that's the idea, freakin' Cisco!
Our organisation is testing our the SDWAN in a mini lab planning to do a full deployment. You have described our currenty network environment 100% from remote locations to office 365. Thanks for the video
This guy's voice is so soothing... Couple that with great content and you have a new sub!
Came for the beard, stayed for the delivery
Hey NetworkChuck Christmas is coming. You better start to prepare the 10 days of Christmas video series, we liked them a lot 😎🙏🏽
+1
+2
Yup
Chuck your videos have helped me so much man, I literally love you and your content.
So, Cisco's doing another proprietary protocol...I see. Glad I'm a Juniper expert! Standards rule!
b0neme those same standards are ALSO covered on Cisco certs! ;)
Customer: "we're looking at using Network Insights"
“oh cool - is that like Tetration?"
Customer: "no, no different product this is Network Insights"
“awesome - is that the same as AppDynamics"
Customer: “no! it's Network Insights - very different"
“is that like DNA and SDA?"
Customer: "no, no .. that's Campus stuff"
“ahh weird, we haven't seen this NAE in the market at all. Is that like ACI?"
Customer: "no, ... it's Network Assurance Engine it plugs into DCNM"
“hmm, why would you use DCNM and not ACI?"
Customer: "well we looked at ACI, but it was too complicated"
“hmm .. so you're going to use their Junior Varsity product instead ... why wouldn't they integrate NAE into DCNM or ACI? Isn't DCNM the same as Prime?"
Customer: "no, no Prime is dead. but DCNM is different"
“so if you use DCNM and NAE, would they still try to sell you Tetration and AppDynamics?"
Customer: "yes, they will"
So you got all these different products, all subscription licenses, different OS's, bolt-on's to existing products, multiple overlapping products, different support teams ... who is really winning here? Product Soup
Just got my CCNA, lovin it, so cool, Cisco all the way, been watching your vids, thanks for your help and support, need more coffee
I only had a brief understanding of SDN, and hadn't heard of SD-WAN before. Great video explaining it and showing the main points. Thanks for sharing.
AAR (Application Aware Routing) polices will steer the traffic. I suggest that you use something like a inline packet storm appliance to get the performance metrics for each application. The packet storm appliance will inject packet loss, latency and jitter over a given ckt. With the metric collected by the packet storm appliance you can tune your AAR policies. I hope this helped. Great video :-)
Wow - I haven’t been so captivated by discussions about networking. Gained a subscriber!
Thanks Chris! Welcome.
this video just blow up my mind, I know how to work over cisco devices know about networking but this, this is another level thank you so much for share your knowladge.
We started to use SDWAN here from Citrix. I only can say that kind of tech is amazing. We have all of our branches running over SDWAN. It's like magic, man.
I mastered Cisco IOS already years back , MPLS Dmvpn etc. that’s why I am doing Web And Mobile App programming
Well now.. I recognize the fat guy in the green shirt ;)
Great video! It was nice speaking with you at the SDWAN booth!
In 2022, I still prefer the CLI for Cisco products. I was setting up a FirePower1120 series and VPN wouldn’t work until I went to CLI to run certain commands. Meraki works well as a GUI, but Cisco needs to step it up on GUI even if I personally prefer CLI. For Catalyst switches, I stay away from GUI. Hopefully they got it right on the SDWAN side, but reading the comment above seems like they have more work to do. Dell and Netgear M4300 have better GUI where you really don’t need to mess with the CLI.
I work as a presales consultant for big MSP (one of market top players) and customers very often come and think SD-WAN solves all their pains and helps them to reduce costs by 10, 20, 50%. I have to admint that SD-WAN is very big improvement (especially automation and simplification of deployment), but at the end it as good as its underlay network and therefore at least for business critical applications MPLS will stay in place. By the way we deploy Cisco SD-WAN and trust me, it's not that stable and reliable as Cisco is trying to bullshit you. Therefore definitely don't trust Cisco saying you can abandon MPLS and move to the Internet only network for all your locations.
I’m working at GE, and I was able to save +80% costs from MPLS after the migration for an entire region. (No more MPLS now!)
This was really good. I was looking for a good overview of SD WAN and NetworkChuck did a great job breaking this down and making it fun. Well done.
Chuck..I must say you are amazing at explaining things. Thanks for your giving back to the community
Probably the best explanation of SDWAN I've seen anywhere...... Great Video
Thank you!
we have deployed ARUBA SD-WAN solution in our environment, which is replacing a decade old technology. we have successfully deployed this solution on 11000 sites, 3500 more to go. yes I said 14500+ sites.
hey nice to hear this .
Who did the cabling work and routing changes for you?
I started working for a local Wireless ISP at the beginning of this year and we're starting to investigate SD-WAN solutions to implement into our network. Even for the small ISP network we've built, it's growing fast and we're trying to find ways to manage the transition as seamlessly as we can.
Just saw you today at Cisco Live 2019 San Diego! Your beard did not disappoint. Keep it up my brotha!
I chose to get into networking 6 months ago and I'm taking my CCENT in one week, your videos terrify me that I may have made the wrong decision! I feel like the stuff I've been learning is ancient at this point.
Nate Bader take the exam. SDN will not supersede IP/MPLS within this decade. You still going to need the knowledge you will be gaining from the Cisco Routing and Switching Curriculum for you to be able to understand SDN. Im planning on taking the CCIE Routing and Switching within 2 years as it is still valuable in the market.
You are adorable Nate
@5:15 i Don’t think Aaron liked that joke too much 😂 Great video though Chuck !
Nice session. Company I am working with now starting deployment of SDWan with approximately 14000 routers (800 Series) to replace. Should be interesting.
Mark Barnes Holy crap! Good luck.
Very well explained, even with around 50 branches we are in a big mess considering routing and security!
Great explanation! Probably the best out there. I was recently introduced to SDwan myself..
If I put my CIO risk management hat on and I'm sitting in front of a CFO who's asking hard questions; I'll choose MPLS for voice. Why? I like my time off.. I hate voice quality issues more than I love new tech. This is a risk management argument I'll bring to the table every time. You're basically outsourcing your routing. Same thing you're doing with MPLS but without the support horsepower of the ISP.. Whats your voice quality worth? Put a price on it.
I'm currently deploying a SDwan solution, from a startup vendor, for a large client. We're moving away from ISR's sharing BGP info with the MPLS provider and have ASA's with a fail over IPsec/GRE tunnels to the head ISR/ASA... It's breaking my heart.. It really is. Primarily because it works and we have 0 voice quality issues.
SDwan might be 'simple' but it's only as good as your plan to migrate and as good as the knowledge level of the folks deploying it. If they don't understand basic routing and networking; if they're not good listeners and their method of deployment is rigid; it's like talking tech with my greyhound. Actually, taking tech with my dogs is a LOT more enjoyable.
I fear this SDWAN stuff might be allowing some of us to forget how to be 'elastic' and confine us to the rules that these devices set, like 'inside the box' thinking.. Sure, SDwan is all these things sounds great in a sales meeting but my experience delivering this vendors SDwan solution has been pretty awful. I haven't even seen it work yet.. but if their deployment plan is any indication, it's going to be a total s%^ show once it goes live. I hear a lot of sales subterfuge AKA- double-talk.. AKA-- BULL-S^&*
So I'm not dogging SDwan, but I can't stress enough; SDwan doesn't change physics.. The basic rules of networking still apply. Planning still applies, maybe even more so.. Don't get caught up in all the hype.. You still need to be firmly rooted in network basics..
ya know its funny, we've had arguments about that with a hard headed CIOs and VPs before that would tear a strip off us when voice quality got the tinest bit of messed up. Now its move everything out, even Voice as a Service and now there is no conern for quality, like WTF?? MPLS is solid, it works. Now everyone is drinking from the same punch bowl and want to move services out of their datacenters, but in order in offer the same quality to these services, the network overhaul has to happen. I dunno, somewhere between TCO and ROI, not sure if this all add up yet.
I would rather sit inside the lav in an airplane on a 10 hour trip to somewhere really unpleasant, than do a SDwan deployment like the one I just did, again. Awful Experience..
It's so funny to see Cisco play catch up (and I am Cisco certified) on many newer network technologies. Having to acquire Viptela to get into the SD-WAN game was a late move. We implemented transparent SD-WAN 2 years ago, and finished it over a year ago across 400 sites. Little need for BGP routing now either, as we have VPN's going from each branch to each data center, and to our cloud services, all transparent to the apps, and routing is pretty much throw it out the gateway and let the SD-WAN figure out the best circuit, and route depending on type of traffic, destination, and circuit characteristics, all on the fly. While there will always be a need for advanced routing protocols on the backbone networks that tranport VPN's, Virtual circuits, and and SD-WAN traffic, there is going to continue to be less and less need within corporations that are not transport providers, unless they have truly massive sites.
thanks fo share Chuck, I took this video as my introduction to SD WAN, now I am very interesting so I will research myself how this technology works.
so true. In service providers networks they will still running mpls because it´s benefits of label switching, free bgp core, path selection and so on. It's a very solid protocol that works very very well with any other L2 and L3 protocols, specially with IP. but in customers network they definitively will migrate to SD-WAN for it's lower costs and for the custom traffic control that it provides.
I came here for the network stuff. But i have to say, that pug is adorable. Those dogs are amazing.
huge thanks for these updates, Chuck Keith Sir! we really need bits of updates such as these from this side of the tech industry to keep us informed without having to go into the very details of them as we already have a heap of other things on our plate already. just enough to keep us updated. keep 'em coming Sir. thanks again!
Here is the thing, MPLS is still going to be used, even with more and more companies using SD-WAN. There are still needs for low time convergance, traffic engineering, and *niche applications*.
This was what the old guys were saying about X.25 AND ATM/FR... it will never die....lolol
Hey, Chuck love your videos.
Need a video on your office setup it looks awesome.
I think you should look into Fortinet and their products. I'm taking a cyber security education right now and it's mostly Fortinet, which has around 40+% of Sweden's market share of firewalls, while Cisco only has around 10%.
Their products, especially their Security Fabric and their FortiGate (firewall) with a lot of management in a single-pane-of-glass etc. They are very underrated! Would love to see more videos about them :)
i work in Cisco.. i can feel this drastic change.. i see your videos.. keeps me motivated..
Thanks for the comment Benson!
@@NetworkChuck thanks Chuck Kieth.. coffee is also my weakness hehehe
A lot of the features you were taking about sound like the Cisco Meraki service it update a few days ago. It changed it's security section to "Security & SD-WAN". The fundamentals of SD-WAN have been in application for quite some time now. It seems like Cisco is now referring it's WAN security as SD-WAN. Sights of things to come.
hi Mr.Chuck
i am very satisfate about your content , and i am pleased and thankfull for your vlogs. god bless you
This is a great video! One of the only things that I found that actually gives a Sufficient explanation of what SD-WAN is without getting too dry with all the bolts underneath.
I have not used Cisco’s Viptela solution, however, I have a 40+ site deployment of SD-WAN using Talari Networks, and did PoC with SilverPeak & Meraki as well.
It’s unreal how much better SD-WAN is than traditional WAN connectivity! So much better that it Actually makes it difficult to sell engineers on it sometimes because it sounds too good to be true.
You do still face performance challenge is over the WAN with these types of solutions, but the approach to solving them is much simpler
I definitely encourage everyone to look at SD-WAN Solutions or any networked topology that spans multiple locations regardless of the quantity, as you can typically bring a FAR superior SLA to your organization/customers while simultaneously saving a significant amount of money. (Say what?!)
Chuck (or anyone for that matter), I am always delighted to have discussions surrounding these technologies. Feel free to reach out!
/Evan
most of time, the problem comes from remote side ISP connection.
Hi Chuck- nice review. Cisco is following Sophos RED (Remote Ethernet Device) example . This is the future - hands free no CLI site-to-site connectivity.
Reminds me of a lot of the things I've been doing with Fortinet the last few years. Glad to see Cisco getting deeper into the SDWAN game now.
Victor Weis Fortinet is also getting there with 6.0 but 6.2 will be better.
Chuck, your enthusiasm is so inspiring.
hey I'm studying for my ICND 2 and this just made what I am studying obsolete, what the Heck Chuck. this was still good stuff to know and I'm just giving you a hard time so don't take it in the wrong way.....
traditional networking is not going anywhere anytime soon.
I love your videos and knowledge sharing to the community. Chuck, you're an awesome dude 🤘🏼
Literally going over MPLS, DMVPN for my CCNA in a week and then this video comes up
MPLS its not even in the test lol
@@xdjoanxd It is in the exam topics.
@@xdjoanxd Better tell that to David Bombal and Wendell Odom and the exam topics lol
yeah saw it, just a describe come on..
@@xdjoanxd Yeah brah, thankfully I can configure it now too with the help of Bombals GNS3 course. Did you learn to configure it at CCNP?
I just came across your channel and it's exceptionally informative and very well done. However I do want to say that in your video your beard looks amazing! It's so shiny and healthy looking, would you mind sharing what products you use to care for your beard? 😃
Great videos Chuck ! you're making the networking fun and motivating us to learn new technologies, keep it up !!
That second phone behind you, the one on the right, looks like the same Cisco ones we have at work. The one above it looks like the ones we had before it. I'm not very knowledgeable of voip stuff (never had to manage it), also I love to hate on Cisco but the new ones are so much better, they sound a thousand times better than the old ones, especially on the speaker. The display is nice too, but I have some nitpicks with the interface. Sometimes I just sit there and listen to our phone bots talk and just appreciate how good it sounds.
i bought boson because of you. im working on the ccent now, thanks for all your work bro!
So.... pretty much Cisco Meraki? Except with ISRs? We deployed a Cisco Meraki network with 84 branches :) We jokingly said it was poor man's MPLS... Same features you spoke about, unbelievable network management such as failover, wan load balancing, auto VPN, almost auto deployment and network insights on a whole new level. About to write my CCNA R/S and still pursuing my CCIE R/S... Don't ever think that studying any Cisco cert won't have a clear, well thought out upgrade path through Cisco when this eventually becomes ubiquitous :) Great video, almost as much energy as I have about networking on a daily basis :)
Great explanations Chuck, its almost like you're a trainer or something.....hehe Thanks for the great content looking forward to future SD-WAN Videos on here or hopefully....someday.....my CBT Nuggets account.
SD WAN is very promising and cool. But This Cisco/Viptela analogy of SDN and SD WAN is misleading since is not explaining the core differences (which are significant). There is a giant Gap between Overlay orchestration concept of SD WAN, versus SDN which is indeed a true decoupling of the control Plane and the forwading Plane.
OMP is not the Control Plane interface of the Router. It feeds route information to all routers from a central place (= some input to update RIBs). It is some type of Dynamic routing protocol. But it doesn't waive that much stress on the router, which still has to map frame/Packet/session to a RIB and start a look up in the FIB. The FIB is still controlled by the Router OS.
SD WAN is mostly about, central Management Plane, some decoupling of "central" Control Plane to CPE Control Plane (pre processing & optimization of the RIB).
An SD WAN Router OS has actually a lot more processes to manage than traditional router OS ever before (Classification + Flow monitoring reports #of tunnels). Rules are just better orchestrated, for global deployement and "edge" CPU (a lot) more powerful.
Technically, SDN is allowing you to decouple the OS of the Network Device, so an OpenFlow / SDN switch is all you need.
Good point. This is just a shill marketing bullshit for the network engineer newbies that dont know any better. Classic networking isn't going anywhere soon.
Indeed a lot of marketing drives SD-WAN forward, which is its biggest problem. Customers expect that SD-WAN solves all their problems while allows them to lower TCO. It's not entirely true especially because of expensive licensing model (at least for SD-WAN by Cisco).
Software Defined Wide Area Networking. When it was first introduced to me, it was decided not to introduce it to system admins or network tech's, only to programming stream students by the training organisation I was attending at the time. I'm glad I did SDN regardless,! We realised in seconds that it was going to be a game changer for networking!
Wow, that was great, thanks! So much change from the first time I built a shelf to hold up a WellFleet router. LOL!
I just got hired at CBTS in Cincinnati for TriHealth.
They have close to 200 sites. All except 5% of those sites are small doctors offices. This would be a awesome thing to upgrade to. I'm sure we're talking millions of dollars to do this.
Gosh I'm in love with your content delivery!!
Chuck , you are the best .... I watch all your videos on CBT nuggets ... Keep going bro ....
Great vid, we use MPLS through around 100 sites and it is managed by the ISP however SD WAN might be the way to go for this!
Would I be able to use a current Cisco 4321 as I see that is a feasible router or would I need a whole separate router with the software on it to work?
I would look more into SD-WAN before making the jump if I were you.
thanks Chuck, Great energy level and thanks for the short and concise video of SDWAN and to understand on high level.
Our requirement for low latency, jitter, etc. between offices disappeared. It was primarily for an old VOIP system. It HURT paying for MPLS for those sites until our contract was over. We just have basic IPSEC VPNs between locations now. There's a fiber line and a cable/FiOS/fixed wireless backup with failover. So much cheaper and we can change whatever we need whenever we need. I'm only dealing with 15 sites though, and our methods will only scale to a point. I also have to do cutover manually if a circuit isn't down completely. I wish I could get funding for something like this, but we're cheap.
The problem with SD-WAN that no one here seems to be talking about is lack of visibility and what happens when things break. For technical issues that take longer than a couple minutes to fix, you have to call the vendor, and you're at their mercy. I literally had this feedback from a customer I was visiting. I can see why Cisco sponsored this. This dude is on some hardcore kool aide. xD
Awesome man! your explanation! when you show hardware with details!
I work for a telco and ISP and we manage a mix of vendors SDN/SDWAN products over cable broadband, ethernet, fixed microwave, and LTE, via public internet or private L3VPN with ~25K nodes total and growing fast. VeloCloud and Meraki are the bulk of them. Our largest single tenant network is around 4K sites on SDWAN with HA standbys so 8K boxes with tens of thousands of routes in one VRF/Segment. The SDWAN buzzword is just a focused use of open source SDN technology to address the specific roles and issues WAN links have. Networking essentials are the same even when they hide things under a pretty webpage. Its rare we have to use the CLI unless we are working with the developers testing code or Linux patches because it, VM/containers, and python live in most of these new devices under the hood so understanding those things is helpful.
We can quickly add capacity because we just spin up more VMs for as many orchestrators and cloud gateways we need. Customer migration is easy because we connect the SDWAN cloud gateways to the existing MPLS VRF/BGP instance if they have one like it's just another PE. The SDWAN gateways redistribute the MPLS BGP routes into their protocol inside the 'cloud' and advertises cloud routes back into BGP for the MPLS based users to hear like any other remote site on the MPLS. The edges can also redistribute OSPF or BGP and translate the routes if there is a onsite router that needs those beyond the SDWAN edge's LAN side. We have customers that have select sites on SDWAN with their data centers and other cloud provider NNIs tied to MPLS circuits all working together nicely in the same L3VPN. Seasonal retailers that setup those holiday mini location tents in malls or popup tax offices love them because they can plug in whatever bandwidth they can get on short notice and it just works if whatever they plug in has public internet access and their user traffic is VPN secured. The boxes usually have enough ports to connect everything without a switch in smaller installs. The biggest thing customers have hang-ups with when going SDN is the design considerations of the underlay/overlay model with separate data and control planes and that these boxes are not normal routers that do things the way they are used to. While they provide routing and switching services and some features like DHCP they operate more like a server that likes to be ran via API.
SDN is awesome because it solves many problems at the same time. Intent based networking orchestrated by the design in a single source of truth which can also generate your network diagrams and provide the monitoring dashboard. The API lets you make bulk config changes or automatically provision networks like a data center does server tenants from your ordering system. With SDN you get much more granular control of the traffic to layer 7 if you want so bandwidth usage is more efficient. It's also secure end to end because everything is in a VPN tunnel with VxLANs inside. Failover is pretty awesome when you can lose a WAN link and no one except the NOC notices unless the other circuit is dramatically slower. Why pay for a backup circuits that get little usage except in failover unless you come up with some overly complex policy routing that is a pain to load balance and manage in scale. Pings and voip calls never drop in a single WAN failure on some SDWAN systems even tough the circuits are from separate ISPs that have no idea you are basically multihoming via VPN. Each WAN link carries VPN tunnels back to the gateways to your 'cloud' or each other directly if you want to allow edge meshing or can force everyone to go through a hub gateway. Config management and system patch deployment is built in and automated. I don't have to hope a box was configured properly or have to be updated in the field because the design changed after it shipped. The box gets the latest OS image, config, and security stuff installed when it phones home to activate across a secure tunnel. The box ships factory default so no one can spy my stuff in transit so my PCI/HIPAA regulation sensitive customers are happy.
I just discovered your channel. definitely solid material.
Thanks Chuck, very informative SD-WAN explanation
The vSmart capabilities start to make those fail over circuits more cost effective since you can start offloading some traffic to them. This gives a lot more bang for the buck, especially as you scale to a larger number of sites in the network. This is an incredible change when presenting to executives and will fundamentally alter ROI Calculations for implementations of such technology in the Enterprise. This sort of technology could conceivably start producing an ROI within just a few months of implementation.
Never, ever fall into the trap of vendor lock-in :)
Isn't everything Cisco vendor lock-in? We typically utilize lesser-known services with a backup plan should they go defunct, etc. Most software works whether folks are in business or not (unless you are dependent on their backend. WE DO NOT DO THIS.)
Could you show the Service Level Agreement for the network connection when moving from 'MPLS' to 'home broadband' for your business?
from 99.9999 to 99.9
There isn't rely isn't SLA for cable networks. At least most of the time.
Wow, omg thats amazingly amazing!!!!!!
Loved your videos man, fan of your work.
Thank you. Sd wan is still new to me and this gave me some awesome insight!
MPLS is kind of a primary on most SD-WAN's we see and do. It is an overlay on the MPLS and the Internet. Velo, Citrix-Netscaler, Nuage Networks/Nokia are the other big players that do this very well.
Network chunk is awesome. Very Informative video presented with lot of coolness.
I just started a new job as a network engineer working for a Dairy company, and let me tell you, they are still using SUPER dated Cisco gear (I'm talking ASA 5505 firewalls and old Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches), and they are still managing and t-shooting networks through the CLI, mostly due to the fact that they don't have the budget or the need to upgrade to the latest and greatest networking tech. They are still using MPLS which has a TON of issues mostly because they don't implement redundancy, but i agree with what is being said here Network Programmability is the way of the future, so i definitely recommend everyone to learn Python. But first get your CCNA and get your foot in the door and get some real world networking experience and then learn programming to complement your networking skills. This is the shit they don't teach you in school, the learning never stops in Networking once you finish school, you are constantly having to stay up to date in this field.
Chuck! You're the man! Love every single video! Holiday give away coming soon? 🤔
Nice vid bro! btw u have a cool black shirt! what brand u are using?