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How to add SD-WAN capability

hi guys,

At the place I work at, we have a primary internet line and a secondary internet line. The secondary isn't being used as it is a failover. However, the primary line with a Cisco 1941 has got its CPU usage to almost 90% every single day. The secondary line is not being utilised at all. That also has a Cisco 1941.

We have a change freeze window coming up for almost 2 months! So we can't do anything from this Friday onwards.

The future plans will be to upgrade WAN bandwidth and change the Cisco routers. But for now, if I wanted the secondary line to become utilised, would you use a Meraki Mx68 to do the load balancing? So that it would sit in front of the two routers and it would load balance the traffic to one or the other to turn it into an SD-WAN capable system?

Are there any other ways that you can think of?

Thanks for helping
Yash

arnold

Look at velocloud from VMware.
Sd-wan is an overlaying service that has your two feeds
The sd-wan IPs are then used to access the inside

You can use a device, system that can handle multiple wan feeds that you can configure to use
I.e. Inbound service flow over one while outgoing lan traffic glows over the other.

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Aaron Tomosky

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Bryant Schaper

You could use the Meraki as well. Velocloud is great too. They will both eliminate the 1941.

But if you keep the 1941, you still have to deal with the high CPU, that will probably not change with an additional circuit. It is a result of the services you are running which would more than likely not change, unless it is doing some security functions as well.

But do you need SD-WAN, are you connecting to another site or just internet?

Yashy

ASKER

This is very interesting. The primary feed has an internet breakout and uses the MPLS to connect to all of our other sites. The secondary connection is sitting there doing nothing in case of a failover.

How would Velocloud work? It is software but surely i would need routers? Is the Velocloud also a piece of hardware?

Are you able to explain it in layman terms? That would be great as then I can take a simplified explanation and visualise it.

Thanks again
Yash

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arnold

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Bryant Schaper

The MPLS does add some complexity but is supported by Meraki and Velocloud.

Aaron Tomosky

mpls is supported by meraki, but requires a router that supports BGP pairing to the carrier to be in front of it. VeloCloud can BGP pair directly to the MPLS carrier without additional equipment.

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Bryant Schaper

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Aaron Tomosky

thanks Bryant, didn’t know the BGP feature set had hit GA, haven’t touched one since early this year.

atlas_shuddered

Just on a whim, is CEF activated on the router and if so, is it really noted? As a general rule, unless you are running a crap ton of services on the router, then your CPU shouldn't be that high to begin with. CEF is one exception to this.

Yashy

ASKER

Thanks a lot to all of you. Before I close this off, @Atlas_shuddered, are you saying that CEF should generally be turned off?

atlas_shuddered

Hmmmmm. That one is tricky. As a rule, I kill it when I build a new router and only turn it on once it is confirmed that I need it. As a general rule, it at the least doesn't hurt anything, until it does and then it can be pretty painful - i.e. the proc having a meltdown due to entry overload.