blog about Cisco SDWAN Performance Boosted for Singletenant Deployments

Imagine your SD-WAN network as a high-efficiency transportation hub, with controllers serving as the central command center. When command center resources are insufficient, network congestion and performance degradation become inevitable. This article examines hardware configuration recommendations for Cisco vBond Orchestrator, Cisco vManage, and Cisco vSmart Controller in single-tenant environments to ensure optimal SD-WAN infrastructure performance.

As the core management component of the SD-WAN solution, Cisco SD-WAN Manager handles policy configuration, device monitoring, and troubleshooting. Proper resource allocation is critical for maintaining stability and performance. The following table details compute requirements for networks of varying scales:

The SD-WAN control plane consists of three primary components, each with distinct resource requirements:

vBond Orchestrator: Serves as the initial contact point for devices joining the SD-WAN fabric. A minimum configuration of 4 vCPUs and 8GB RAM is recommended, with storage requirements of 60GB for the operating system.

vSmart Controller: Handles routing decisions and policy enforcement. For networks with up to 2000 devices, 16 vCPUs and 32GB RAM provide adequate performance, with 60GB allocated for the OS volume.

vManage: Requires the most substantial resources due to its centralized management functions. The scaling requirements shown in Table 1 should be followed precisely, with particular attention to RAM allocation during periods of heavy analytics processing.

1. Future growth projections to avoid frequent hardware upgrades
2. Peak usage periods that may temporarily increase resource demands
3. The cumulative impact of additional services like analytics and monitoring
4. Hypervisor overhead when deploying in virtualized environments