One year ago, Cisco acquired Viptela which was one of the most successful SD-WAN startup. Viptela is a very well-designed SD-WAN solution that made SD-WAN adoption easy for large scale networks. Viptela SD-WAN solutions have several key features like Segmentation, Centralized Policies, Zero Touch Provisioning, Configuration Templates etc. that can be very helpful to the customers.

Viptela solution has four main components. Each of these components have a very specific role as described below:
vManage – Management Dashboard.
vEdge – The edge router at branches.
vBond – The Orchestrator.
vSmart – The Controller.

One of the key features of SDN/SD-WAN is the separation of the Control Plane and Date Plane. Viptela solution can scale up to thousands of branches because of the separation of the two planes.

Control Plane – vSmart is the Controller in Viptela solution and manages the Control Plane. vSmart does all the complex work of path calculation, route advertisement etc. there by offloading the Data Plane to do only packet forwarding.

Data Plane – vEdge routers at the branches form a Data Plane. The vEdge router’s job is to forward the packets based on the policies configured by the Control Plane. The Data Plane keeps a constant connection with the Control Plane to get updates from the Control Plane.

Management Plane – the vManage is the GUI based Network Management System that handles the Management Plane. vManage is a single pane of glass that gives you various key stats. Operations team can use vManage for doing day to day operational activities e.g. code upgrades.

Below are the main functions of the Viptela SD-WAN components:

vManage functions:
1. Centralized GUI based Network Management System.
2. Let’s use configure policies on vSmart via GUI as well as manage the network devices.
3. Shows key metrics on GUI e.g. circuit bandwidth usage, loss, latency, jitter, number of down nodes etc.
4. Shows the cFlow and DPI information for troubleshooting.
5. Let’s user do simple operations task e.g. code upgrades.
6. vEdge configuration templates are created in vManage.

vEdge functions:
1. vEdge are the hardware or virtual routers at the branches.
2. vEdge supports all the basic functions of the routers.
3. Supports protocols like BGP, OSPF, OMP and BFD.
4. Model types – vEdge 100, vEdge 1000 and vEdge 2000 that support 100m, 1g and 10g encrypted throughput respectively.
5. vEdge TLOC – TLOC stands for Transport Location. TLOCs are used to uniquely identify the circuit interface to Control Plane and Data Plane information.

TLOC = Circuit interface color + Site ID + System IP

System IP: Viptela systems uses System IP to communicate with the vEdge for the Control Plane. The System IP of each vEdge has to be unique.

vBond functions:
1. vBond is the orchestrator and the gatekeeper.
2. vBond validates that the vEdge trying to join the overlay is authorized to join or not.
3. vBond Orchestrates the connectivity between vEdge routers and vSmart controllers.
4. Ensures that valid vEdge routers can build the control plane connectivity.
5. vEdge builds temporary connectivity with vBond until the vEdge forms connectivity with the vSmart.

vSmart functions:
1. vSmart is the brain of the entire system.
2. Works with vBond to authenticate Viptela devices as they join the network.
3. Builds Control Plane connections with vEdge using TLS.
4. Orchestrate connectivity between vEdges via the policies there by creating the network topology.
5. Acts as a Route reflector by advertising the branches prefixes based on the policy.
6. Shares the data plane keys of a vEdge with other vEdges based on the policy to allow them to build the tunnels – IKEless IPSEC.
7. Policies are configured on vSmart.