Disclaimer: I work at Cisco for the Customer Engagements Center of Excellence, which includes dCloud. Among other things, I am also a dCloud developer. dCloud is a sales and training enablement platform that allows Cisco, Partners, and Customers to demonstrate Cisco’s solutions.
Demo Solutions, Get Hands On
I’m continually surprised by how many people are unaware of the Cisco dCloud environment, where Cisco, Partners, and Customers can get hands on (virtually) many of Cisco’s solutions free of charge. All that’s required is a CCO account on Cisco.com. Besides many publicly available dCloud demos, there are also exclusive demonstrations that Cisco account teams and partners can provide access to in order to showcase Cisco’s latest technology solutions. A lot of customers (and Cisco internal employees) still aren’t aware of the content that’s available in dCloud.
I first experienced dCloud as a customer before I worked at Cisco. At the time, my company was looking at FirePower and IWAN solutions but we wanted to go beyond the data sheets and PowerPoint presentations. Our sales engineer told us about dCloud and helped get us set up, and even shared some relevant content to demo.
I was blown away by the ease of setting up a dCloud demo and getting right off and running with virtual sandboxes and playgrounds surrounding solutions that we’d never had the ability to play with before. Let’s step through it below.
The landing page for dCloud. dCloud has data centers all over the world to facilitate content delivery.
After logging in for the first time, you’ll be prompted to choose your home data center. This is mostly a quality-of-life choice, as you have the ability to switch data centers as needed to spin up demo content. Then you will be presented with the Content Catalog:
The dCloud content catalog. Not all content is visible to all users – If a particular topic is interesting, coordinate with your account team or partner to get that content made available to you.
Once you select a piece of content to schedule, it’s just a matter of selecting the time frame for the demo to run. dCloud is a shared platform, and resources are managed by the platform. This means that demos should be scheduled with an eye on timing, as the platform resources are not infinite. By default, users can select up to 5 days for a single demo (platform resource allowing), and users can also save a copy of the demo for themselves if the demo isn’t blocked.
The scheduling will fail in this data center because on Sunday there aren’t enough resources free to schedule the demo. This may be different in another data center.
When the demo has started, the easiest way to interact with it is usually to establish a VPN with the demo environment. The VPN will depend on the data center that content is being run in, and the username/password is platform-generated.
AnyConnect is the most common way to connect to the demo environment, though OpenConnect also works.
Most demos have a virtual workstation to interact with, or can be managed directly from the user’s computer. Each demo has documentation which explains the intended way to use the content.
For this demo, the intention is to use Remote Desktop to the in-demo workstation, and then manage the Viptela environment from the vManage web console.
As mentioned, most demos have related documentation that explain the best way to get hands-on with the demo content. Some demos can be saved locally and then modified to be more of a sandbox environment, or to show specific customization.
Here is a custom demo that I saved based on the SD-WAN content created by Dustin Schuemann.
Now that my custom demo is saved and launched, and my VPN connectivity active, I can use RDP to access the demo workstation and start looking at the SD-WAN demo environment.
In my demo, I created an IP Scope/Schema for the environment to aid in policy and template creation. There are also Python scripts to simulate latency. Google Chrome has the vManage Dashboard bookmarked.
And, this is where we will pick up next time.
Why bring up all this information about dCloud? Because the dCloud content is what I plan to use to deliver this SD-WAN Deep Dive series and I want people to know where the topology and environment is coming from. I’ll also point out here that Cisco DevNet enthusiasts may already be aware of dCloud as the host of many of the DevNet Learning labs!
Let’s Get Ready to Rumble….
Okay, so before we get down and dirty with the SD-WAN, let’s look at the demo. Here are the relevant facts:
- Data Center 1 and Data Center 2 each have firewall services as well as a LAN-side interconnect using OSPF via Cloud Service Routers.
- Branch 1 has dual vEdges acting as the Layer 3 First-Hop Gateway for the branch, as well as dual connectivity to MPLS and Internet transports. Each provider connects directly with one of each vEdges, and there is an extra layer of redundancy built between them called a TLOC extension which we will discuss in the future.
- Branch 2 has a single vEdge, dual transport connectivity, and is connected to a router running OSPF which is the Layer 3 gateway for the branch.
- There are three separate service VPNs (think in terms of a virtual routing and forwarding instance). VPN 10 is for standard corporate users, VPN 20 is for PCI-compliant traffic, and VPN 40 is guest wireless, which only exists at the branches, is not allowed to communicate with any other sites, and will utilize direct internet access.
Pay attention to the IP Addressing and Site IDs. VPNs can be thought of as VRFs and exist on the same equipment.
Notice the IP address schema has changed slightly for this VPN.
Again, the Guest Wifi only exists at the branches and will utilize direct internet access to locally offload the traffic.
Tune in Next Time…
In the next post we will examine the vManage Dashboard and start talking about the SD-WAN fabric. In the meantime, I’ll add some useful links:
