Practice SD-WAN requirement

Hi,

I want to implement and study sd-wan on my laptop 8 gb of ram i want know wich is the best method to learn sd-wan and make practise thanks

Hello Ugo,

If you want to build your own lab, you’ll need more memory. You can’t run the Cisco SD-WAN images with only 8GB. You need a lot of memory, especially if you want to run 20.x:

https://www.eve-ng.net/index.php/documentation/howtos/howto-add-cisco-viptela-images-set/

You need about ~28GB of RAM to run the controllers. Each vEdge router requires 1GB of RAM. You probably also want to run some other devices, like an IOS switch or router. A laptop with 32 GB of RAM is probably not enough.

If you really want to use a laptop, I would suggest at least 48 or 64 GB of RAM. It might be a better idea to use a dedicated second-hand server. For example, a Proliant DL380 G8 with 128GB of RAM is about $500-600:

You can run VMWare ESXi on it. When you don’t need it, you power it off (which you can do remotely).

Another option is Cisco’s Devnet or dCloud:

These hosted labs are free. They can be useful if you want to try different things.

Rene

Hello René, I have the same problem. I want to buy a virtual machine online, and in this VM, I want to install my GNS3 and try lab scenarios and SD-WAN. Do you have any example suggestions?

Hello Noureddine

If you’re going to run GNS3 as well as SD-WAN on the cloud-based VM, it would probably be a good idea to choose at least the amount of RAM that Rene suggested for a physical server. Go for a minimum of 48GB RAM if you want to create more elaborate SD-WAN configurations.

GNS3 is not as resouce intensive as SD-WAN, but it too will depend on the size and complexity of your topologies. The great thing about purchasing a cloud-based VM is that you can add more resources as needed. If you find that you’re running slow or you’re maxing out your RAM, you can easily scale up (depending on your budget of course).

So there’s really no clear cut answer, it depends on the complexity of the topologies you’ll be running, as well as if you’ll be running them concurrently. So I’d say start with 48GB and then move up if you see you need it.

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz