How to Design Redundancy When Deploying VMware SD-WAN Edges in AWS Cloud

Products

• VMWare SD-WAN
• VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud

Issue/Introduction

This KB article documents to VMware SD-WAN customers how to design for redundancy when deploying VMware SD-WAN Edges in AWS Cloud. 

VMware SD-WAN customers who want redundancy at a site within their enterprise have two options:

1. Deploy their SD-WAN Edges on-premises in a High-Availability topology
2. Deploy as a Cluster of VMware SD-WAN Hub Edges

However, deploying High-Availability as described here in the AWS Cloud is not currently possible because VMware SD-WAN uses a proprietary protocol to exchange heartbeats over the HA cable that connects the HA Edge pair, and AWS Cloud does not currently support Layer2.

Environment

VMware SD-WAN

Resolution

Solution: Clustering

With High-Availability not an option, Clustering is the recommended deployment option for enterprises that need to extend VMware SD-WAN to the AWS Cloud in a highly available manner.

VMware SD-WAN Edge Clustering addresses the issue of SD-WAN Hub scale because it can be used to easily expand the tunnel capacity of the Hub dynamically by creating a logical cluster of Edges. Edge Clustering also provides resiliency via an active/active high availability topology (HA). A cluster is functionally treated as an individual hub from the perspective of other Edges.

For more information about Edge Clustering, check VMware SD-WAN's online documentation here.

BGP over IPsec is supported beginning with VMware SD-WAN version 4.3.0, and now enterprises can deploy multiple VMware SD-WAN Edges in different availability zones and leverage AWS Transit Gateway to provide connectivity from on-premises to AWS workloads.

Architecture 

What happens in a failure scenario?

In the unlikely event of an availability zone or a cluster member failure, the load is distributed among the remaining cluster members. Also, the overlay tunnels will be redistributed, and the convergence time will consume ~30-60 seconds as described here.

How to deploy the VMware SD-WAN Edge(s)

Two AWS CloudFormation templates are available here.

If you have not created your transit VPC and subnet(s) and desire to deploy your first VMware SD-WAN Edge, please use the Greenfield Deployment Template. 

However, if you already have your VPC and subnets created or seek to add a VMware SD-WAN Edge, please use the Brownfield Deployment Template.

Note: The CloudFormation templates deploy a single VMware SD-WAN Edge instance at a time.

Please refer to this video to learn how to deploy a VMware SD-WAN Edge in AWS using a CloudFormation template.