Crazy about VMware SD-WAN

  The following Features will be discussed in this second part of my blog TCP Optimization Techniques Dejitter Buffering SAAS Application Monitoring   Before diving into the mechanism here an important basic fact:     Remediation is never done for applications classified as LOW priority     TCP optimization TCP has some embedded traffic management capabilities for reliable traffic delivery  (window.size, slow-start, RTT handling,...)  But there are a bunch of factors which can negatively influence the performance, like Latency TCP-slow-start Last Mile network problems Out of Sequence packets Busty losses end host TCP limitations (missing fatures like SACK, windows scaling or timestamp options)  Typically TCP optimization helps on the transmission side and improve the download time for large data transfers over latency-high and lossy WAN links. But it can also be used for improving perfomance when on the receiver side the amount ...

 In the last year I got quite deep insight into ther vendors SD-WAN implementation and also have seen what various vendors are critizising about the VMware DMPO features. Also there are a lot of misconceptions on the market around some of these features. So let´s try and evaluate and look a little bit deeper into typical performance features and the VMware implementation of them Features discussed in this Blog (Part 1) Per Packet Load Balancing Forward Error Correction (FEC) Packet Replication Latency Remediation The following Features will be discussed in Part 2 of my blog TCP Optimization Techniques Dejitter Buffering SAAS Application Monitoring   Per Packet Load Balancing  Unfortunately this term can be quite easily misinterpreted, when you Google for the term and get the following result:  This behaviour (often criticized by other vendors about VMware) as described above would only work quite well when you have very similar or equal connections. If for example 2 ...

  Per default in version 5.2 the new Angular (html5) based GUI is now the only installed one. So you should  get familiar with that new UI  But if you search and search and do not find the necessary item in the new UI but need it urgently, what can you do ? An operator can allow also the classical UI by changing a System Parameter to TRUE:  and then the operator or MSP can enable the classical UI for the customer as Operator/MSP/User then you see the "Open Classic Orchestrator" in the upper right area NOTE: the classic UI is not maintained anymore, so there are already some items only vailable in the new UI and any new feature will only be visible by using the new UI Working with the new UI in my environment there were 2 features which were not easy to find. 1. Assign new image to an Edge In the old GUI you could go to the Configure/Edges and under Actions you could select "Assign new Image to Edge". It seems that this feature has been removed (I double checked the ...

 Since version 4.0 VMware is working on the new (Angular)UI and still in version 5.0.0.x only parts have been converted up to now. I think now it is time to look and compare, but also see where there  are still weaknesses in the new UI. One meaningful enhancement is the possibility to also see under PATHS the existing Overlay Tunnels from that device  Unfortunately it takes some time until new paths are visible here and for some time you do not see any usage It is very complicated to get actual information out of that graphics as it seems that they are updates only every 5 minutes  The above picture was taken  at ... and it seems, that this tunnel close at 10:03, which is not the case, it is still running. I completely understand, that for bigger SD-WAN networks it is impossible to have up-to-date information ready immediately, but I would expect to have a similar live view for an overlay path or for all overlay paths, like you get on the underlay, or at least a...

 In my previous blog I stated, that in VMware SD-WAN we can have Branch to Branch connectivity via overlay, as long as we have the branch routes announced with a maximum of 2 overlay hops away. Now let´s proof this assumption in my lab and modify it in order to establish a 4-tier hierarchy: I applied a new profile to the Regional Hubs, which now have only overlay tunnels to the 2 DC-Hubs, thus removing the permanant tunnel between all Regional Hubs. There is no change in paths between Branch Edges and DC-network  VPC-A1> ping 10.1.201.2   (VPC-DC) 84 bytes from 10.1.201.2 icmp_seq=1 ttl=60 time=58.340 ms 84 bytes from 10.1.201.2 icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=19.604 ms 84 bytes from 10.1.201.2 icmp_seq=3 ttl=60 time=48.628 ms 84 bytes from 10.1.201.2 icmp_seq=4 ttl=60 time=180.321 ms 84 bytes from 10.1.201.2 icmp_seq=5 ttl=60 time=23.469 ms VPC-A1> trace 10.1.201.2   (VPC-DC) trace to 10.1.201.2, 8 hops max, press Ctrl+C to stop  1   10.2.201....

  Recently my teaching collegues from VMware sent me this range of questions: "Can I create a full, global mesh even using different hubs? Gateways are not an option in this scenario. In other words, I have: AMER DC with Hub Cluster EMEA DC with Hub Cluster APAC DC with Hub Cluster  And I have profiles that use dynamic E2E VPN set to use the regional hub.  Can we, in this topology, get, essentially, a full overlay mesh between Edges directly? Like, can I actually build a tunnel from, say, a Tokyo Edge to a Chicago Edge even with different hubs?   Will secondary hubs in the VPN config provide the meet-in-the-middle connectivity in order to create the E2E VPN?  My understanding of the hub cluster order in the Cloud VPN config is that we simply use the first cluster, but if that is unavailable, we use the next cluster in the list." My first assumption was:  In my opinion (static or dynamic) E2E works only when there is a single or 2 hop continuo...