Multi-vendor SD-WAN sites

[yuri.denisov]

I am new to SD-WAN, and need some guidance from the respected forum…  Here is my basic question:

What if I want to connect two branches, while one has a Viptela SD-WAN and the second one is from another vendor? Is it possible to establish an overlay between SD-WAN sites of different vendors or shall I migrate one of them to fit the other?

Thank you.

[Manish Gogna]

Hi Yuri,

The router/edge would be talking to the controller from one vendor at a time to get the policy and other updates based on which it would route the data/application traffic. IMO as a best practice you should move to a single vendor solution by analyzing your requirements and checking which vendor is fulfilling those ( i am pretty confident that our Viptela would come out the winner :) ).

[yuri.denisov]

Thank you for your reply, Manish!

So each router/edge will be talking to its own controller, respectively. Correct? And what about an overall picture? Who is responsible for making sure that these two sides of the same "bridge" are properly converged. Is an additional third orchestration/hierarchical controller unit needed? 

[Manish Gogna]

All the edges under one vendor will talk to the same controller(s) ( vSmart or vManage ) and will receive/forward traffic based on the config they download from these controllers only.

[yuri.denisov]

Yea, this is exactly my point. So in order to ensure that each of the controllers will download a matching configuration to their corresponding edges/routes and enable connectivity between the two branches, I must have an additional entity (like a hierarchical controller or orchestrator) that contains an overall picture across the both domains. Does Cisco offer any solution for this? 

[Manish Gogna]

For a particular vendor like Cisco the cluster of controllers ( vSmart or vManage ) maintain an identical configuration, so the edges will always download uniform config/updates. Please note that this is true for a single vendor environment only.

For your statement "I must have an additional entity (like a hierarchical controller or orchestrator) that contains an overall picture across the both domains." there is no such solution that i am aware of which can be the controller/orchestrator for a deployment having edges registered to controllers from different vendors.

HTH

Manish