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