The Advantage of Cisco SD-WAN Multitenancy – Cisco Blogs

SD-WAN is fast becoming the standard for enterprises and service providers to connect users to applications reliably and securely across the remote workforce, branches, data centers, and multicloud. In a time when digital transformation is expanding exponentially and applications shift to the cloud and hybrid cloud, multiple use cases have emerged that necessitate very different network policies, security privileges, routing priorities, bandwidth requirements across different subsidiaries, partners, and customers. SD-WAN multitenancy has become a critical network implementation to manage multiple network environments.  Multitenancy enables enterprises and managed service providers to cost effectively and operationally scale their businesses.

Cisco SD-WAN has supported multitenancy since 17.3 IOS XE and we have added additional enhancements and scale with our latest 17.6 IOS XE release. Multitenancy in SD-WAN enables enterprises and managed service providers alike to manage multiple business units or customers, commonly referred to as tenants, with a single vManage cluster. The tenants share the same set of underlying Cisco SD-WAN controllers that include vManage, vBond orchestrator, and vSmart controller hardware. The tenant data is logically isolated on these shared controllers. Multitenancy supports both on-premise and cloud deployments, supporting up to 100 tenants and up to an aggregate of 5,000 devices.

Multitenancy in SD-WAN offers an array of advantages, including flexibility, efficiency, and elasticity, which become even more evident with cloud computing.

• CapEx saving – Multitenancy allows resources to be consolidated where control, management, and orchestration planes are shared across multiple tenants. Scaling up now has fewer CapEx implications as new tenants can leverage the same underlying platform.
• Operational efficiency – Multitenancy streamlines infrastructure management, software updates, and maintenance. Users can now rely on a centralized IT team or a managed service provider, thereby eliminating costly on-site management and support. Regular updates and new releases are also available immediately to all tenants, leading to improved uptime and operational efficiency.
• Service flexibility – Multi-tenancy is designed for instant set-up and self-service configuration under an as-a-service model. Multitenancy in Cisco SD-WAN supports both on-prem and cloud with support for KVM and ESXi.​
• Scalability – Multitenancy is designed to support tenants of all sizes, both large and small, irrespective of their location. Enterprises and managed service providers can instantiate and customize new network services for their respective end users in a simple and easy manner.

vManage multitenant dashboard

(Click on the images for full screen view)

As SD-WAN solutions become integral parts of enterprise network connectivity, multitenancy expedites the deployment, operation, and management of global SD-WAN infrastructure. Enterprises and managed service providers will see the greatest benefits as scaling up from multitenancy innovation now has fewer CapEx implications.  Centralized management and operations enhance operational efficiency. As-a-service model provide the flexibility and scalability to address unique requirements of diverse use cases.

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