https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts daily 0.75 2020-08-25 https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts/art-of-network-engineering-ep1 monthly 0.5 2020-07-24 https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts/art-of-networking-engineering-ep2 monthly 0.5 2020-07-24 https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts/u2xj0pbrs6kt2z2frjlk89xi1whm01 monthly 0.5 2020-08-15 https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts/the-art-of-network-engineering-s1e4 monthly 0.5 2020-08-15 https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts/cisco-champions-radio-s7e32-ultra-cloud-core-built-for-the-future monthly 0.5 2020-08-25 https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts/cisco-champions-radio-s7e31 monthly 0.5 2020-08-17 https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts/the-art-of-network-engineering-s1e5-halo-memes-and-harry-potter-castles monthly 0.5 2020-08-25 https://www.aaronengineered.com/podcasts/the-art-of-network-engineering-s1ep3 monthly 0.5 2020-08-15 https://www.aaronengineered.com/blog daily 0.75 2020-10-19 https://www.aaronengineered.com/blog/wan-for-dummies monthly 0.5 2020-08-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595434714005-0KJ9G2NB0GUUUB7P60RC/VPN+.png Blog - WAN for Dummies https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595435013210-A4BYGU9SJMGU1HZ5699W/MPLS.png Blog - WAN for Dummies - My oh my what an intimidating mouthful that is. Without boring you to death with what that even means, in a nutshell it’s just a product that an Internet Service Provider can sell you that can connect your sites together. Essentially, instead of you creating the VPN over the Internet, they create one for you (how nice of them) using their network. The yellow lines in the picture adjacent reflect the virtual connections the ISP has made for you in their network. There is some configuration on your part to interact with the ISP so don’t think you are getting away with this without doing any work. These MPLS services typically come with some cool bells and whistles as well as some uptime guarantees so that you can rest easy knowing your network won’t fail. Afterall you are paying for it. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595432907468-TQ2YRL546HUX1GSUF78E/LAN+Topo.png Blog - WAN for Dummies - It’s important to quickly touch on this here for reference. Local area networks are typically confined to one geographical space. Let’s say, an office building or even your own home as an example. In these networks all the components are designed to talk to each other using a combination of an IP address and a MAC address. The devices that move traffic from one device to another are called switches. And those switches use the MAC address of every device on the network to figure out where traffic needs to go. If you want to leave your LAN and go to the internet, enter the router. That device looks at the IP address you are trying to talk to and quickly determines that you are trying to find something that isn’t on the LAN and then promptly sends you out to the Internet. The router is going to play a key role going forward here so just keep that in mind. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595433368892-1XCKKY1YWHVC3AKI7Z42/WAN.png Blog - WAN for Dummies https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595435827675-X5KHBFHXO0H8YZ2ZW8JJ/Metro+E.png Blog - WAN for Dummies - Metro Ethernet or Metro-E for short, takes the intervention of the ISP one step further. While behind the scenes on an MPLS the service provider is really just creating a VPN for you (again, how nice of them). The metro-e connection allows you (if you wanted to of course, no one would dare tell you what to do) to remove the router component from this completely. Yep you read that right. You could connect your sites together not using a router at all and if that ain’t easy, I don’t know what is. https://www.aaronengineered.com/blog/sdwan-for-dummies monthly 0.5 2020-08-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595709917398-L01ZJF2AP9JC9015C0O1/VPN+Usage+CLIP.jpg Blog - SDWAN for Dummies Here you can see how the ‘what’s more important’ logic effects the bandwidth of the VPN using a pipe as an example. We start with 100MB of bandwidth but we have to make sure that the phone traffic we are sending over the VPN prioritized so we carved out 90MB to make sure that if someone is on the phone there will be enough bandwidth so that we don’t lose call quality. Without getting into too many details here, the reason we are picking on VOIP is due to its sensitivity. Let’s just say it’s a bit needy. This only leaves us with about 10MB to share for all of our other traffic. Doesn’t matter what it is, it’s only getting 10MB… TO SHARE! The example is a bit exaggerated but I did that to make the point crystal clear. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595709674649-UWAPK0THDX1P2CVSN6DX/SDWAN+router+decision+tree.png Blog - SDWAN for Dummies https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595710267771-9DN0KIHYR4V17AXQBN8X/CLI.jpg Blog - SDWAN for Dummies https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595710232238-WY2POSC84WUURSUPZAR7/VIPTELA.png Blog - SDWAN for Dummies https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595710822543-QYJHDZ28VBE67SU6NLTX/Tiger2.jpg Blog - SDWAN for Dummies - The configuration of all this is no longer done via CLI (command line interface) like days past. The CLI is exactly how it was 40 years ago. You get a better graphical experience from playing one of those tiger handheld games from the 80’s. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595703834148-THA354BNK6LGTQFYUA1Q/VPN+Decision+Tree.png Blog - SDWAN for Dummies - The picture illustrates two basic options. We have one Internet connection. When traffic enters the router destined for a remote network, a decision will be made that says whether you are to be sent over the VPN or not. That’s it. No fluff here. Just a simple A or B decision. Since a router uses IP addresses to make forwarding decisions, you either fall into the first ‘bucket’ of IP addresses or the second. Once that simple decision is made, you are off on your merry way. Like I pointed out before, there is nothing wrong with this at all. In fact, most WAN’s today operate on some version of this simplistic decision-making tree. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1595434714005-0KJ9G2NB0GUUUB7P60RC/VPN+.png Blog - SDWAN for Dummies https://www.aaronengineered.com/blog/sdwan-link-aggregation monthly 0.5 2020-08-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1596304698322-7Y9IHXET1LURL67RMWCY/Flow+based+Hash.jpg Blog - SDWAN Link Aggregation - In the image to the right you can see the red traffic coming from user 1 and the blue traffic coming from user 2. The red traffic arrives first and is sent out of the first connection. The blue traffic arrives second and is sent out of the second connection. If there were a third connection, that would be sent out the first connection again. That pattern continues until the bandwidth is consumed. This is referred to as ‘flow based’ because the flow from the first user is always going to use that first connection. When a new flow starts, it will pick the next link in the list. The point here is that we are using both links. It’s not very granular but hey, they are being used! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1596306402249-AG9MDYEH9ALA2CPPIL76/Application+based+hash.jpg Blog - SDWAN Link Aggregation - Expanding on our earlier example, I have chosen that our business needs to prioritize salesforce and phone traffic to be specific. Everything else like twitter, instagram and facebook should go out my lower quality connection since those apps are not business critical. This means that if the cable modem dips below that latency and packet loss requirement I put in place, salesforce and phone traffic will switch to the DSL connection seamlessly. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1596305289659-121L3RFV8E1GTSVLUBDF/Multiple+connections+with+speeds+into+the+router.jpg Blog - SDWAN Link Aggregation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1596305580219-3XEIO3OFJQM7AV9T6L0J/Multiple+connections+with+speeds+into+the+router+primary+secondary+tertiary.jpg Blog - SDWAN Link Aggregation https://www.aaronengineered.com/blog/sd-wan-underlay monthly 0.5 2020-08-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1596391879414-M4VG3D8MA9IRHZCIF5E1/Silverpeak.jpg Blog - SD WAN Underlay Options https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1596302777761-7FJBUB0UA6AP577RE6KG/apocalypse.png Blog - SD WAN Underlay Options - I know. EARTH shattering stuff there. After all, the idea here is to get you off and running with your first WAN or to give you a nice shiny new version of the one you have now. https://www.aaronengineered.com/blog/mpls-for-dummies monthly 0.5 2020-08-31 https://www.aaronengineered.com/blog/sd-wan-vs-mpls monthly 0.5 2020-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1597769435179-GYCFNWUSEOUDYADYAL55/MPLS+and+Cable+Aggregate.png Blog - SD WAN vs MPLS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1597769863851-1FMKQU34LYIPS62GO4XL/MPLS+and+Cable+Aggregate+with+3+VPN+Dotted+.png Blog - SD WAN vs MPLS You can see here that there are three different logical paths for the traffic to take(represented by the dotted lines). These paths are predefined in the SDROUTER using applications signatures. I have configured the SD Router so that all of my current MPLS traffic needs to use the ‘Main VPN” that you see in green. This way, nothing has changed from what I was using my MPLS for previously. What a seamless transition! What I did add however, is the backup VPN connection that is ready to go, should the MPLS stop performing the way I want it to. Notice that I didn’t say that the MPLS had to be “DOWN” for the backup VPN to be utilized. Remember that I can set parameters around packet loss and jitter for instance in most SDWAN deployments. If that MPLS connection starts actin’ silly on me, something is already preconfigured to take over without a hiccup. The last piece of the puzzle is the traffic destined for the Internet. I have just sent that straight out the cable modem and it will not traverse any VPN’s. NEAT!!!!!!!! https://www.aaronengineered.com/youtube daily 0.75 2020-08-06 https://www.aaronengineered.com/youtube/1fwxi02y50fjupimzh6nm56y4xxizb monthly 0.5 2020-07-15 https://www.aaronengineered.com/youtube/jor5hdxdcfy0o1jde2iyalq2exl6wx monthly 0.5 2020-07-15 https://www.aaronengineered.com/youtube/hwulbwhj7r7jc01sasg8cbvwpzeyi3 monthly 0.5 2020-07-15 https://www.aaronengineered.com/youtube/wip0vpanqvx2m2wmwzpzicc4x43bnf monthly 0.5 2020-07-15 https://www.aaronengineered.com/youtube/owclx94u7n6zi0xqf6t3z6uxp891s7 monthly 0.5 2020-07-15 https://www.aaronengineered.com/youtube/te5zqym40q3687uhdhmlmjvf5e7rfg monthly 0.5 2020-07-21 https://www.aaronengineered.com/youtube/diy-ac-infinity-fan-install monthly 0.5 2020-08-11 https://www.aaronengineered.com/about daily 0.75 2020-08-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1594839363678-QAMQECIUVC4S4DAR4WXL/IMG_0190.JPG About https://www.aaronengineered.com/home daily 1.0 2020-08-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ecdbe857cbea467bb7291cc/1594839118419-KBD7PF26MDPYVGC19WL7/aaron.JPG Home - Aaron has a YouTube channel called aaronengineered where he creates videos about networking, certifications, and his homelab. He is a co-host on the Art of Network Engineering podcast as well as the Cisco Champions radio. Additionally, he writes a blog on this website. https://www.aaronengineered.com/contact daily 0.75 2020-07-18 https://www.aaronengineered.com/merch daily 0.75 2020-10-18