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LAB 5 - Traffic Engineering - End-to-End Path Tracking

What is End-to-End Path Tracking?

As we have seen in the previous lessons, Centralized Control Policies allow us to design and configure traffic engineering. To understand what end-to-end path tracking is, let's first look at a simple TE use-case shown in figure 1 below.

Cisco SD-WAN version 20.x on PNETlab

This lesson will show how to run the latest Cisco SD-WAN software version on a PNETlab virtual machine - an alternative network emulator that some think is better than EVE-NG. However, the process is absolutely the same for all network emulators. This method requires a Cisco Smart Account, though.

What is a Centralized Control Policy?

A centralized control policy is a policy that manipulates the route and tloc information that is exchanged between the vSmart controllers and the vEdge devices in the Cisco SD-WAN overlay fabric. It can influence the overlay topology of IPsec tunnels and the routing paths through the fabric.

LAB 2 - Hub-and-Spoke - Allowing hub-to-spoke routing

In our previous lab lesson for Centralized Policies, we restricted spokes of establishing data plane tunnels to other spokes by filtering out TLOC advertisements at the vSmart controllers.

LAB 1 - Hub-and-Spoke - Restricting spoke-to-spoke tunnels

The default behavior of the Cisco SD-WAN overlay fabric is to build a full mesh of IPsec tunnels between all WAN edge routers with different site-ids. There is a scaling limitation because WAN edge devices at the remote sites are typically not sized to handle hundred of thousands of IPsec tunnels and BFD sessions. A better more practical design approach is the use of a Hub-and-Spoke topology.