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Cisco SD-WAN (formally Viptela) is quickly becoming the go to WAN solution for Cisco customers. As companies are looking to replace their aging DMVPN solution, Cisco SD-WAN has become the logical choice. Companies can stick with the same ISR platform running IOS-XE that they already know, and in some cases can upgrade their existing routers to work with SD-WAN. But this blog isn’t a sales pitch...

Cisco Meraki recently introduced the MG series Cellular Gateways to be a reliable solution as a backup internet uplink. In the event that the primary internet uplink goes down, the MG gateway will provide high availability for internet connectivity via wireless WAN connectivity using a cellular network. The MG Series also simplifies configuration and management using Meraki’s dashboard.

I am currently finishing a project where I am designing a custom Quality of Service policy for a customer's suite of business critical applications. The customer uses MPLS as their WAN and the bandwidth for the MPLS is different depending on the site; Datacenters have more bandwidth, branches have decent bandwidth, and small kiosks only have a few megabits of bandwidth. The customer noticed that...

It’s been a while, but we’re finally back to close this blog series on Cisco TrustSec (CTS). If you haven’t yet, go check out the other entries in this series.

Learn what Cisco TrustSec is and why we care here.

Dip your toes into the components involved here.

Begin your Cisco TrustSec classification journey here.

Propagate yourself over here to learn about Cisco TrustSec propagation.

Now that...

We have all been there; sitting down to dinner on a Sunday night, when you get an alert that one of your branches has gone offline. You politely excuse yourself from the table, open your laptop and start troubleshooting. The problem, you can’t access any of the gear to troubleshoot the issue, and the gear you can access isn’t providing any answers to why the site went down. Now you are faced with...

Have you ever found yourself in a position where throughput between devices, either local or across a WAN, seemed lower than expected? You may start by checking the configuration and logs on the network devices along the path, hoping to identify something out of the ordinary or unusual. Often a smoking gun isn’t immediately identifiable which then requires a coordinated approach to...

One of hottest topics in networking is SD-WAN. Being the latest thing, organizations are not always clear on how, or why, to deploy a solution like SD-WAN.

This blog follows on from my last post and continues the discussion on how to integrate a single/pair of SD-WAN routers into our existing branch site topology. If you missed that last blog, then you can check it out here. Don’t worry I’ll be right here waiting for you.

In my last post we looked at the steps that a vEdge goes through to bring up its control plane connections and authenticate itself onto the fabric. In this post we will follow on from where we left off and see how we use these control plane connections to exchange topology information, WAN policies and security keys via OMP.

In my last post in the series I introduced you to the four architectural components that control and enable our SD-WAN fabric. In that post I had promised that in our next installment we would take a closer look at our fabric bring up sequence, but if you will indulge me I would like to hold off on that topic for the next post. In its place I would like to use this post to introduce you to the...