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SD-WAN - Management Plane

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The management plane provides control and visibility to the entire fabric. It has the following characteristics:

  • Single pane of glass for Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 operations
  • Real-time alerting
  • Centralized provisioning
  • Configuration standardization
  • Simplicity of deploying
  • Simplicity of change
  • Supports various programmatic application programming interfaces (APIs)

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager is on the management plane and provides a single pane of glass for Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 operations. SD-WAN Manager meets the needs of enterprises and service providers alike by providing single and multitenant functionality. It has a web GUI with RBAC. Some funtions of it include:

  • Centralized provisioning
  • Centralized policies
  • Device configuration templates
  • MnT the entire environment
  • Centralized software upgrades on all fabric elements, including
    • Cisco WAN Edge routers
    • SD-WAN Validator
    • SD-WAN Controller
    • SD-WAN Manager itself

Use the API of the SD-WAN Manager to enable DevOps and extract performance statistics collected from the entire fabric, which can be exported to external systems or to SD-WAN Analytics.

SD-WAN Manager should run in a high-resiliency mode. An SD-WAN overlay network can be managed by one SD-WAN Manager or by a cluster, which consists of a minimum of three (3) SD-WAN Managers. The recommendation is to build a network (especially a larger network) with a SD-WAN Manager cluster for redundancy and load balancing.

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