🚁Should you want to implement Multicast across your SD-WAN network, Catalyst SD-WAN gives you this capability.

🛸Multicast is implemeted across your overlay SD-WAN fabric, which offers a more optimised network performance compared to traditional unicast routing.

Catalyst SD-WAN supports the following Multicast Protocols:

🚀PIM v2 – Source Specific Multicast and Any Source Multicast.

• IGMPv2 and v3 – For any receivers that want to join a Specific Multicast Group. v3 is required for SSM.
• Multicas Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) – Gives you the capability to join multiple Multicast domains. So should you have a RP in each domain of a Multicast Group, MSDP allows you the capability to exchange information. A bit like MPLS L3VPN route leaking in between different VRFs.

With ASM, a Rendevous Point is needed, SD-WAN supports the followng RP:

• Static
• Auto
• Auto Proxy
• Bootsrap

🤩In Catalyst SD-WAN I have previously introduced the term transport, OMP is responsible in sening Multicast traffic across the WAN. WAN Edge devices is responsible for sending its own routing information to the SD-WAN Controller who in turn reflects this back to other receivers who is interested in the Multicast group. This is called Multicast Service Routes.

So how does this work in the SD-WAN World? Specifically Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN?😎

👍A Multicast source could be sitting behind a WAN Edge at a branch site, You could have the RP sitting where the Source of the Multicast Group to allow the Multicast Tree to be built. An OMP Replicator is introduced in the SD-WAN Fabric, the job of the OMP Replicator is to receive the Multicast Source and in turn reflect this back to the receivers interested in joining the multicast group (using IGMP).

⌚From a design perspective, it is better to place the OMP Replicator connected to higher bandwidth with higher end performance IOS-XE device.

What is it?
SD-Routing bridges the ‘in between’ from a traditional WAN and SD-WAN. I think of it as in the middle, so you’re not quite ready to jump on the SD-WAN train 🚅 but would like to move on from traditional WAN.

Traditional WANs, you configure devices via CLI, and if you had 20 branches you’d end up with Notepad++. With SD-Routing, you can configure traditional features of a WAN but via GUI (SD-WAN Manager). I learnt the hard way by configuring SD-Routing using v20.13 realising certain features are missing. With v20.14, I can actually configure devices and pushing them out via Configuration-Groups. 🌟

On top of configuration, you can monitor your devices/WAN with SD-Routing.

I have managed to lab SD-Routing and hope to talk about this more in my next/future posts!

This is just a high-level and I have included some slides that illustrate SD-Routing, next post should be demonstrating how to configure SD-Routing. As usual, I hope this helps! 😁

AAR in Catalyst SD-WAN allows enterprises to prefer a set or specific underlay Transports over another based on thresholds. So for example an organisation may prefer to route a branch with two transports (LTE and Lease line) but preferring the lease line over LTE. The threshold is measured based on:

✨ Latency ms
🥐 Jitter ms
🍿 Packet loss %

You would configure within the Groups of Interest in SD-WAN Manager initially to determine what the threshold should be. So if an application is experiencing 10% packet loss which breaches the threshold , you can configure to fallback to the LTE for just that specific application and drop everything else. Or alternatively to route all traffic over to LTE transport.

I have attached some screenshots that illustrate how to configure AAR.

Hope this helps! 😁

One of the great features with SD-WAN is that you take away a lot of the manual tasks with the ability to group a specific action and apply to multiple devices.

For example, with traditional routing (with no automation involved) you have upgraded a new image across to 10 devices and all require a reboot. Instead of manually rebooting each device one by one (CLI ‘reload’ command with Cisco devices) you can just login to Cisco SD-WAN Manager and reload all the devices.

Simple yet effective! 😃

Hope this helps! 😁

In my previous post, I configured my WAN Edge devices and onboarded via SD-Routing.

With v20.14 and v17.14, you are now able to fully utilise Configuration Groups with full feature profiles:

😎 System Profile
🍎 Transport & Management Profile
🌰 Service Profile
🍠 CLI Add-on Profile

🙉 In v20.13 and v17.13, you can create Configuration Groups but with only System and CLI Add-On Profile.

🤖 If you are unsure what Configuration Groups are, it enables you to configure your WAN edge devices such as, IP addresses, Interfaces, TLOCs etc.

😎 This capability allows organisations to simplify and streamline when deploying an configuring multiple devices. Traditionally, you would configure routers via CLI and using notepad as an example.

With SD-Routing, organisations may not want to fully migrate to SD-WAN but want the simplicity of SD-WAN, this is where SD-Routing can bridge the gap! 🌉

Ever deploying Config-Groups/Templates or Policies and the ‘task’ gets stuck or takes a long time if there was an error midway deploying? Which means you have to wait until the task times out waiting for roll back? 👷‍♂️ 🕵‍♀️

I recently found a way using API’s to stop any tasks midway through deployment. 🙌

You can use the Browser to call the API or use alternative like Postman 📮

1 – https://SD-WAN_Manager_IP:8443/dataservice/device/action/status/tasks and look for the specific task which includes a name of the task being deployed. Something like this…..deploy_config_group-83752a36-bf40-4d67-b32f-aea75845ed8c

2 – Open a new tab and copy the Process id to the following link:
https://SD-WAN_Manager_IP:8443/dataservice/device/action/status/tasks/clean?processId=deploy_config_group-83752a36-bf40-4d67-b32f-aea75845ed8c

3 – You should then see a return with Success : True.

🧗‍♀️ Following steps:

1 – Ensure when you login to the Smart Account to create your license or PnP portal to select Autonomous and not Controller.

2 – Make sure the underlay is ready to go and can communicate with your SD-WAN Fabric.

3 – Add the license file and update the WAN Edge list, you should see (SD-Routing) screenshot attached.

4 – Configure your WAN Edge devices either via Bootsrap or Manual or PnP. My example, I have configured this manually with the following:

netconf-yang
sd-routing
organization-name JHOANG65511
site-id 77
system-ip 77.77.77.77
vbond ip 192.168.10.3
wan-interface GigabitEthernet1

request platform software sd-routing activate chassis-number CHASSIS token ID