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SD-WAN Fundamentals: Step-by-Step Project Implementation
58 students
SD-WAN Fundamentals: Step-by-Step Project Implementation
Design, build, migrate, secure, and operate a real enterprise Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN fabric [EN, ES, HI, PT subs]
Created byJozef Baros
Last updated 7/2026
English
EnglishSpanish
What you'll learn
- Explain why SD-WAN exists and the three core ideas behind it: separate the planes, build an overlay, and drive everything from centralized policy.
- Describe how the fabric moves a packet: OMP (control plane); TLOCs, colors, IPsec, and BFD (data plane); and VPN segmentation.
- Design an SD-WAN network end to end — transports and colors, topology, segmentation, controller placement and sizing, addressing, and certificate trust
- Build the foundation: bring controllers to a trusted state, onboard a WAN Edge with zero-touch provisioning, and configure at scale with feature templates
- Operate and troubleshoot for the long run: the four health signals, a layered diagnostic method, three fault playbooks, safe upgrades and change management
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Course content
10 sections • 140 lectures • 12h 28m total length
Requirements
- Solid fundamental networking knowledge: IP addressing and subnetting, routing basics, and what a VPN/tunnel is.
- Familiarity with a router/switch CLI and reading show command output (Cisco IOS-style helps but isn’t essential).
- A general understanding of WAN concepts (MPLS, broadband/Internet, LTE) and enterprise topologies (branch, data center, hub).
- Helpful but not required: exposure to BGP or OSPF, QoS basics, and basic network security concepts (firewalls, segmentation).
- No SD-WAN experience needed — the course starts from first principles.
- No lab or special hardware required to follow along; all configuration and command output is provided and explained. A lab (physical or virtual) is optional if you want to practice.
Description
***Before enrolling, watch the free preview videos, so you know what you are getting. ***
Most SD-WAN training throws features and acronyms at you. This course does the opposite: it follows one realistic enterprise — a mid-size retailer we call “Meridian” — through a complete SD-WAN project, from an aging MPLS network all the way to a secured, cloud-connected, fully operational fabric. You learn every concept exactly where a real project needs it, so nothing ever feels abstract.
Designed as a conceptual framework, this video-and-article course details the fundamentals of SD-WAN technology and network design methodology. Please be advised that the scope of this course is strictly theoretical, focusing on architecture rather than practical lab simulations or product demonstrations.
You’ll start with why SD-WAN exists and how the fabric actually moves a packet (OMP, TLOCs, colors, IPsec, BFD, and VPN segmentation). Then you’ll design the network end to end — transports, topology, segmentation, controllers, addressing, and certificate trust — and capture it in a High-Level Design. From there you build it: bring the controllers to a trusted state, onboard your first WAN Edge with zero-touch provisioning, and configure at scale with templates and configuration groups.
Next you migrate live, trading branches onto the fabric in controlled waves without a business-impacting outage, then make the fabric intelligent: centralized control policy to shape topology, and data policy with Application-Aware Routing to steer voice onto the healthiest path, break Microsoft 365 out locally, protect traffic with QoS, and steer guest traffic through a firewall. You’ll then secure the fabric to a provable, PCI-ready standard, extend it to the cloud, and finish with a complete operations and troubleshooting toolkit — a monitoring practice, a layered diagnostic method, and three fault playbooks.
Every lesson pairs a short, plain-English video with a written theory article you can search and revisit, and every section closes with a knowledge-check quiz. The examples target Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN (Viptela), but the deeper method — separate the planes, design against requirements, stage every change, verify before you trust, make segmentation provable, read before you touch — is portable to any platform and any vendor.
By the end you’ll own the mental models to reason about the fabric and the hard-won “watch out for this” habits to run a project like this yourself.
Disclaimer: This is an independent educational course. It is not affiliated with, authorized by, sponsored by, or endorsed by Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco, Catalyst, IOS XE, Viptela, and related product names are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates; Microsoft 365 and Azure are trademarks of Microsoft; AWS is a trademark of Amazon, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners. The company “Meridian,” along with all sites, addresses, IP ranges, device identifiers, and command output, is fictional and illustrative, simplified for teaching. Feature names, syntax, licensing, and platform behavior change between software releases — always verify against current vendor documentation and test in a lab before applying anything to a production network. This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Who this course is for:
- Network engineers and administrators who are new to SD-WAN and want a structured, project-based introduction.
- Traditional WAN / routing & switching engineers (MPLS, BGP, OSPF backgrounds) moving into software-defined networking.
- NOC / operations engineers who will monitor, troubleshoot, and run an SD-WAN fabric day to day.
- Network / solutions architects and pre-sales engineers who need to design and explain an SD-WAN solution and its trade-offs.
- IT professionals and students preparing for enterprise networking or SD-WAN-related certifications who want the concepts to actually stick.
- Anyone who has heard the acronyms — OMP, TLOC, AAR, DIA, segmentation — and wants to finally understand how they fit together in a real deployment.