Nokia Nuage SDN

When someone asks you what SDN is and what the benefits are, sometimes we don’t know what to reply. However, we know how to design a network architecture and we know what devices we have to buy for the customer’s request but, actually, we don’t know sometimes we are deploying an SDN solution. For instance, when a customer with several internet links wants all VoIP traffic use only one link and another one for backup, and the rest of the traffic use another internet link, we know they need an SD-WAN solution, which is actually an SDN solution.

At the beginning of WAN networks, if you wanted a private network between an office and the datacenter, or between two offices, you had to buy a leased line, which was really expensive. Later on, frame relay allowed us to share the same physical network for several customers. Therefore, it was cheaper. Today, IP/MPLS networks are like frame relay but it also allows us better QoS for applications. However, I think SD-WANs are the networks of the future because they are transport independent and we can manage and control the whole network from a centralized perspective.

WAN networks evolution

Nokia Nuage is one of the SD-WAN solutions based on SDN. This solution has mainly four components. The Virtualized Services Directory or VSD is the management console where network administrators are going to design the architecture and they are going to define the network policies. The Virtualized Services Controller or VSC has the network control plane and all branches’ configurations are stored in this device. The Network Service Gateway or NSG is the edge router where the data plane takes place. Finally, the Elastic Search or ES component is a database which is used by VSD to show network statistics.

Nuage Virtualized Network Services (VNS)

The Nokia Nuage is an SDN solution where we can see each component of an SDN architecture very well because data plane, control plane and management plane are each of them a component. The control plane (VSC) and the management plane (VSD) are usually deployed in high availability, thus, a load balancer is needed. In addition, we could install NSG-UBRs to breakout traffic to another network. For example, we can configure a backup private network through the Internet when the main IP/MPLS network fails.

Nuage VNS standard deployment architecture

Finally, if you are going to configure and deploy a Nokia Nuage SD-WAN solution, you have to know how to configure the network topology. First of all, we have to configure an Enterprise, which is a tenant or end user and they are isolated from each other. The Domain is a layer 3 instance, like a VPRN or VRF, and they are also isolated from other domains, although shared domains with route leaking is possible. A Subnet is a layer 2 instance, like VPLS. A Zone is an administrative group of subnets, which shares the same policies. The last component is the Vport which is a virtual interface of a VM (virtual machine) or LAN side port+vlan.

Service abstractions

Regards my friends! What SD-WAN solution do you like?