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This course provides a comprehensive journey into Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela, designed for networking professionals who want to understand, design, and work with modern WAN technologies. You will start by exploring the foundations of SD-WAN, including the business and technical drivers that make organizations shift away from traditional WAN solutions. We will cover how SD-WAN improves cost efficiency, agility, security, and cloud connectivity, and then dive into the story of Viptela and how it became an integral part of Cisco’s portfolio.

From there, you will gain a deep understanding of the Viptela architecture and its core components, including the role of controllers, routers, and management systems. You will learn how vManage provides centralized configuration and monitoring, how vSmart and vBond operate within the control and orchestration planes, and how vEdge and cEdge devices handle data-plane forwarding using transport locators (TLOCs). The course then builds your understanding of underlay and overlay networks, with a focus on how OMP (Overlay Management Protocol), TLOCs, and secure tunnels with IPsec and DTLS enable reliable and secure transport across multiple connectivity options such as Internet, MPLS, and direct internet access.

The course also provides clear insights into SD-WAN policies and application awareness. You will see how centralized and localized policies shape routing and forwarding decisions, how application-aware routing allows performance-driven path selection, and how segmentation using VPNs supports multi-tenant and departmental isolation. Additionally, you will explore service chaining concepts and how on-premises or virtual appliances such as firewalls and WAN optimizers can be seamlessly integrated into the data path.

Practical configuration and management are also covered in detail, showing how vManage is used for device onboarding, certificate-based trust, configuration templates, and lifecycle management for software and policies. Security principles such as zero trust, integrated features, cloud security integration, and SASE concepts are discussed, alongside compliance requirements like logging, eventing, and data retention.

To help you operate and maintain Cisco SD-WAN networks, the course introduces observability and troubleshooting concepts, including telemetry, assurance dashboards, and a structured troubleshooting methodology that follows the flow from underlay to overlay to application. You will learn how to interpret common alerts such as control-plane failures, TLOC flaps, or packet loss, and connect them to underlying issues.

Finally, the course explores design and deployment patterns for real-world environments. You will examine small, medium, and large branch design models, data center and cloud connectivity approaches, high-availability and scalability considerations, and migration strategies from legacy WAN to SD-WAN in a phased and controlled manner.

By the end of this course, you will have a strong conceptual and architectural understanding of Cisco SD-WAN with Viptela. You will be equipped with the knowledge to design secure, scalable, and cloud-ready WAN architectures, troubleshoot common issues, and make informed decisions for modern enterprise WAN deployments.

Thank you