WAN....it's not the internet!! (sometimes) // FREE CCNA // EP 8

so how do you connect to your data center and when i say you i mean your company your corporate office what about your branch offices how do they all connect is it through the internet is it something else that's what we're talking about today and a massive shout out to the sponsor of this series bozon software they are what i use to prepare for my cisco certifications their lab software their practice exams and now their new courseware golden check them out link below so network chuck coffee we have our corporate office this is where my

employees might work it's where i will work in my big massive office maybe someday and we saw what that network might look like and typically we'll have a three-tier architecture or what i have here a two-tier collapse core architecture that's our lan our local area network and then we looked at our data center network and we took a peek inside that network we'll see a spine leaf topology a class design but there's one thing we haven't covered it's how does our corporate office connect to our data center because they aren't they're separate they're geographically separate

and you might be wondering well chuck don't they just run a cable connect them like that sometimes but it can often get more complicated than that and beyond that connection the corporate office to data center what about our coffee shops this is a coffee company come on we're gonna have coffee shops need to fix my labels here it's getting kind of messy so how do our coffee shops which could be branch offices connect back to corporate or even connect back to the data center as well depending on what they need how all these connections work

how this all connects we commonly call our when our wide area network now just to clear up some terms real quick typically anything inside our corporate office or our data center or whatever our house will call a lan and anything outside those contained networks those private networks will call a wan so that could include the the internet but here when we're talking about wan we're specifically focusing in on how our branch offices or maybe our coffee shops connect back to our corporate office how our corporate office connects to our data center those connections now let

me pause right there for a second let me give you some context why do we even need to connect our stuff like this why do our coffee shops need to talk back to the corporate office or the data center why does a corporate office have to talk to the data center like why do we have to do that well traditionally and how we still do things a lot nowadays is we'll centralize our services so for example i might have my phone system living in my data center my phone system servers let's just say cucm cisco's

version of it and at my coffee shops i would just have my phones i wouldn't have to install a phone system in each place and these phones would need a strong reliable stable connection back to the data center to do stuff to talk to each other to get dial tone voicemail all that kind of crazy stuff we get with phone systems which is amazing and it could be the same thing for the corporate office now what i'm telling you is a real world example this is how my network was designed when i was a network

engineer and a phone system engineer this is what we did and it doesn't stop there we're talking email servers databases websites possibly payroll systems the pos system at the coffee shops you know the point of sale typically all those servers live in the data center or at the corporate office and these branch offices need to talk back to these places okay so that's why that's why we need that communication so how do we make that communication happen okay here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna start with old stuff but it's stuff we'll still see out

in the wild so as you encounter networks you might see this and then i'll move on to the more modern stuff that is awesome and amazing and things you'll want to see so anyways stoneage version right here things that jeremy chara and david bomble used because they're they're old we might connect our corporate office to our data center using what's called a leased line just like you release an apartment lease a house lease a car you release a line a cable that connects your corporate office to your data center now it's not as fast as

an ethernet cable traditionally we're talking t1 t1 speeds which just for reference we're looking at 1.54 megabits per second so blazing fast no and then you know we'd have t3 as well t3 will give us around 43 megabits per second and then if you're in europe we're talking about e1 and e3 with comparable speeds now these leased lines were great because they were just for you just for your traffic whereas a lot of internet connections like your home internet connection is shared so things like performance speed and latency are not guaranteed for you but on

at least line heck yeah they would be but they'd be expensive and getting a bunch of lease lines between my coffee shops and my data center man it becomes a mess and if i want them to talk to each other getting a mesh going on nah it gets messy again you'll still see these but again they're expensive and depending on where your remote branches are at your coffee shops are at they might be hard to actually get and actually let's assign some locations to my coffee shops here this one will be in dallas then phoenix

and my biggest competition i'll put it in seattle now looking at my boson courseware for ccna which is amazing you should pick this up an alternative to lease lines sticking with our old theme here would be frame relay or atm you used to have to know how to configure frame relay for the ccna thank goodness you don't have to do that anymore so we're not going to talk about it forget it get out of here but just know it was an alternative to lease lines and it was a wan option as well as atm but

again lease lines are expensive and it's hard to connect a bunch of different locations and have that connectivity you want but not for the more modern stuff and i use modern loosely because mpls is included in this but mpls and metro ethernet what is that let's check it out need some more coffee let's talk about mpls mpls or multi-protocol label switching it was all the rage in the early 90s and well it's still pretty popular now with mpls we basically tell our internet provider or our carrier hey i want all my stuff to connect and

talk and they say okay we'll take care of it here's a connection i would order that mpls circuit for all my sites boom boom each connecting to a router at each site my other sites don't have routers let me fix that now real quick before we move on i need to say this this is not the internet keep that in mind the options i've gone over so far is not the internet it's it's when it's wide area network but it's all about connecting our sites and only our traffic is going across the stuff so again

i have all my locations that are in different geographical areas dallas phoenix seattle and again when i asked my provider my carrier to connect all these places they said sure here's your connection so we just have the one connection at each site our mpls connection connecting it to our provider's network it's mpls network so when my phoenix store wants to talk back to the data center it'll go to my provider's mpls network and my provider will route and connect to everything connect my sites same thing goes for if my phoenix store wants to talk to

my seattle store they just connect to the carrier's mpls network and the carrier does its magic inside its little cloud there the key difference between this and at least line is that we don't have to have a bunch of leaked lines connecting all of our sites we just have the one mpls connection this has been a de facto standard of how companies connect their branch offices to their corporate offices or their data centers for a while now and for a lot of good reasons because first it's private now yes this network right here is a

carrier network and you're sharing these paths with other customers so you're probably thinking chuck how is that private well it's because they create virtual circuits basically little private networks just for you your traffic is totally separate from the other customers how do they do that well it's part of what mpls does that's why they run mpls the magic word is the label label switching here and it's actually quite fascinating how it works i'm about to geek out you ready so we just covered the osi model right we have layers one two three four five six

seven and the ones we really care about are layers one through four now mpls is an interesting protocol because it's not really a data link protocol and it's not really a network layer three protocol it's actually kind of right here a 2.5 and that's legit what people say at this layer mpls will apply a label saying hey this internet traffic right here come in hot this is network chuck coffee traffic apply that label and when it has that label then the carrier's network will know hey this is just for network chuck no one else can

see this no one we're going to put this on its own private virtual circuit safe secure this is often why you'll hear mpls referred to as an mpls vpn or virtual private network now i'm hesitant to use that term because when you think vpn you think oh encrypted traffic uh you use a vpn on your computer probably your phone i hope you do anyway but with mpls it's not necessarily encrypted it is virtual it is private and it is a network but it doesn't rely on encryption to keep your network traffic separate and safe it

uses the label switching inside of the carrier's network now there's a whole whole thing with mpls a whole a lot of stuff to learn and as you go down the networking path as you go down the cisco path you'll definitely have an opportunity to learn more about it now one last thing these connections at our branch offices at our data center at our corporate office our connection into the mpls cloud or the the mpls network for our carrier it's layer three we're routing so we're dealing with packets not frames if you refer back to my

video on what routers do and what switches do in the different layers and i'm telling you this because we're moving on to talk about metro e or metro ethernet metro e is lit i love it now it doesn't necessarily replace mpls now in some situations it it definitely can i'll show you in a moment but there's a reason mpls is still around it keeps your internet traffic going between your branch offices and your corporate offices and all that stuff separated private secure you're not on the big bad wild internet you're you're still in a private

when but we are starting to see mpls die off is mpls dead not quite but it is dying thanks to something called sd-wan we'll talk about that here in a moment oh and one more thing before i erase everything i want to just say this the router that you'll use to connect to your provider's mpls network will commonly call it the ce router or the customer edge router and then the router you're connecting to in the mpls network the provider's network we'll call it the pe router the physical education no i'm just kidding the provider

edge router and focus on the edge part because the router here is at the edge of our lan our internal network and the pe router is at the edge of the carrier's mpls network anyways just fun terminology you can nestle into that brand of yours as you go down the cisco path again a whole lot of stuff going on in here it's crazy now let's talk about metro e or metro ethernet metro e is kind of just like this just a cable between two sites like legit that's kind of what it is so between my

corporate office and my data center i would contact my carrier and say hey i want a blazing just crazy connection between my data center and my corporate office and they'll say yeah here you go it's gonna cost you now they're not crazy expensive but sometimes it can be but this connection is literally a cable run underneath the city now keep in mind i'm talking about a city here because metro metro ethernet so notice both my data center and my corporate office are in dallas and within that metropolitan area we're going to have lots of provider

cable run underneath the ground to connect these guys and i tell my carrier i want to use one of them and the speeds can vary but in my experience you'll typically see between a corporate office and a data center you'll get a gig pipe one gigabit per second you'll also see 10 gigabits per second and going with redundancy because you should have redundant connections will typically have two two connections now this might feel familiar because it kind of looks like a leased line right and yeah i mean it's it's similar because you got that point-to-point

connection and you'll often hear metro e connections like this between two sites called a point-to-point connection that's what i used to call my connection between my corporate office and data center that's what we called it p2p but obviously it's a bit different because you know it's fast really fast it'll often be a fiber connection and depending on what you pay for it can be a shared line i've seen this but typically when you're doing something like this for your company it's going to be a dedicated line just for you now metro e can span beyond

one geographical area so while i have my two sites here in dallas you could have that connection going across great distances to my phoenix location providers do have cable running these great distances but let me stop right there you won't see this very often where you have your branch office connecting to your data center or your corporate office with a metro e-connection unless that branch office or coffee shop is really important and it's doing a lot of stuff but no it's it wouldn't be economical it wouldn't make sense it's too expensive so typically metro e

is going to be connecting your main offices together data center to corporate office data center to data center you might have your and this is legit companies do this depending on how big they are they'll have a primary data center and also a secondary data center so as network coffee expands got my other data center over here and i want to put this in a different area not in dallas because i want to have some disaster recovery maybe i'll put it in houston or something and i'll put a metro e-connection there boom maybe two two

one gig pipes now what's cool about these connections is they're often layer two you heard me right layer two so it's like you're just again connecting two chords together or two switches together and that's typically what you'll see you're gonna have your switch on this side and your switch on that side your provider will provide the cable but you provide the end devices typically and this will vary but for example in my data center my provider will put a piece of equipment in my rack and they'd say here connect to this port or they might

just dangle a cord down from the ceiling and say here here's your connection connect this to your switch now again this right here the point-to-point is what i've most often seen the most common thing i've seen but it's not the only type of metro e now this one is called e-line this will give you more terms and this circuit you'll often see called an evc or an ethernet virtual circuit but you might see some where the provider basically gives you a cloud switch and you get a full mesh going so we'll have our metro e

connections let's just say all our sites connecting let's just go crazy money is no issue and the provider just gives you one big massive switch that can go across great distances and i say it's like a massive switch because yeah it's gonna be layer two you're gonna be exchanging ethernet frames often your end devices might be switches and whereas the point to point was called an e-line this is called an e-lan which i i love that and again this is the craziest mode probably the most expensive mode but there's a middle option as well the

other option is more of a hub and spoke where i'll have my hub here and i'll have my spokes all connecting back to him as the central site this one's called e tree which is just funny to me with this location being the and and these locations be in the leaves e3 hub and spoke now i want to show you what it might look like to go to a real provider's website and order these services hey i want some metro ethernet well let's see here's spectrum here we're at their business site but we don't want

normal business we're gonna go to products and we're gonna switch over to enterprise solutions because uh that's some special stuff and i'll go to the top here and go to services and under here we got wan we get our wan solutions now we got a few and i'm excited to talk about a few of these but real quick we'll click on the ethernet services which you might imagine that's metro ethernet as i scroll down here this guy looks really happy actually he doesn't what's wrong with that guy so here we have our three different types

of metro e we can order it's obviously different terminology but real quick can you guess which one is which pause the video and see if you know now the first one here ethernet private line that's our e-line let's uh open that up real quick yep point-to-point ethernet connectivity for organizations with two locations it's for high speed low latency and typically involves external partners hotels dr sites but essentially data center to campus environment is very common our ethernet virtual private line this one might be a little tricky right let's open that up and see what we

have and there it is right there we got point to multipoint for companies with a central office and satellite locations and there's terminology right there hub and spoke designs so that's our e tree and then last but not least and definitely not least in cost we have our ethernet private lan true multi-point connectivity creating a transparent wan extension basically a switch in the sky and if you scroll down we find some reasons why we love metro e and it's very similar to mpls as well but with spectrum's metro e now this is not an ad

for spectrum if they want to sponsor me call me but private fiber network awesome backed by service level agreement or slas meaning hey we're going to make sure you're up and if you're not up then we'll pay you back some money like that that's legit these agreements say now let's talk about our coffee shops real quick i mentioned that metro e isn't the best option for connecting these guys because it's super expensive and it's normally meant for your data center to corporate office and or data center to data center connections that's why we love mpls

or loved npls because we're moving beyond that now for a few reasons mainly it's expensive not as expensive as metro e might be but it's still more expensive than the alternative and that's a good old internet connection coming out of your branch office or your coffee shop and when i see internet connection here i'm not talking about the private when that we've been discussing so far no this is public internet in many cases the same type of internet you have right now that you're watching me with right now instead of calling up the enterprise solutions

line i might call the business solution line or just the consumer solution line saying hey just give me give me internet access i don't care what it is just give it to me and using that public internet connection we connect our let's say our seattle coffee shop to our data center over the internet just like that no not just like that we'd have to do something to it we'd have to encrypt the traffic make sure it's safe this would be a vpn or a virtual private network not in the same way that an mpls is

a virtual private network no no here we're adding stuff to the packets adding headers and encrypting it to make sure that when it goes to the big bad wild internet only we can understand what that traffic says or means or is doing that's what you're doing when you use a vpn many of you use a vpn client it's an app or a program you install that when you click on connect it does just this it encrypts and hides your traffic from everyone else in the big bad wild internet because you know what without encryption people

can see your stuff now this type of vpn when it's between two different sites so my coffee shop and my data center we call this site to site vpn now this isn't new we've had this for a long time and it's significantly cheaper than anything else we could use looking at umpls but often people opt for using mpls they prefer mpls why well because this right here this internet connection can sometimes suck it can be slow and again it's going through the big bad wild internet it's not going through a private connection with your carrier

it's not being gently carried from router to router no it's not it's being thrown oh god y'all can make me break my pen the public internet is not a safe place for packets and i've learned this lesson firsthand because i worked for a company that did not like to spend money on mpls circuits so we often had this scenario and the vpn connections would drop all the time uh phone calls would be sucky like because the road traveled here was full of detours and and car wrecks and all kinds of stuff and we also didn't

really have the ability to prioritize certain traffic which means hey i want my phone calls to be given the royal treatment i want them to go to the front of the line if things get hairy women and children first them send this in the voice calls first i don't care if fred is trying to watch netflix you can let him buffer for a bit we have to make sure that phone call sounds good and that's what we call qos or quality of service it's just marking or labeling certain traffic is important and we give it

the important treatment the vip treatment that's what made mpls great we could do that with mpls not only do we have our own private network we could prioritize traffic that way now again i mentioned before that mpls is now dying that's because things have changed now i don't want to go too deep into this right now but i'm just going to throw out some buzzwords and get you uh get you hungry for this buzzword s d when or software defined when this is a direct competitor replacement for mpls sd-wan will use the standard internet connection

that you can get wherever you are and it will make it awesome i'm not going to go into why it's going to make it awesome but it does solve a lot of the problems that i've had with these site-to-site vpn connections another reason sd-wan is becoming even more prevalent than mpls is because man the traffic we care about now isn't always traffic going back to the data center in fact we're seeing less and less of that because of the cloud a lot of the services we're using a lot of things we're doing are in public

cloud now i'm just going to draw like crazy over my screen now aws azure and guess what they're not in our data center so we don't really care about those connections back to our data center as much because now we care about the connection from that site my coffee shop to the cloud and things like sd-wan can optimize that but that's a video for another time okay we covered a ton in this video now i want to see if you were paying attention time to do some questions from the boson xm it's the best let's

check it out now this question is definitely wordy and it might feel intimidating but if you watch the video you could pick out the answer so i want you to do your best here so let's read it real quick your company is a headquarters office and 12 district offices the offices are separated by a large geographic area the current wan consists wide area network consists of a hub and spoke design that uses a point-to-point wan link between each district office and the headquarters office a single internet connection is installed at the headquarters office district offices

receive access to this internet connection across the wan when traffic consists of a mixture of email terminal emulation client server applications and the transfer of small files typically less than two megabytes in size the company recently installed voip telephone systems in all offices analog telephone lines are still used to handle interoffice voice traffic as well as telephone calls to the pstn the current wan configuration meets the company's data networking needs however the company is interested in reducing its annual expenditure for wan and telephone services you have been asked to recommend new wan technologies to replace

the existing point-to-point network which of the following should you choose like three choices that was a wordy thing a lot of things a lot of terms you heard you may have not learned yet that's fine a lot of it was irrelevant so pick out what you know and answer the question pause the video ready set go okay let's see how you did when tackling a question that you really don't understand looking at all the terms you've never heard before you have to pick out what you do know and the focus of the question is to

say hey we want to uh not pay so much for when anymore it's too expensive so let's look at our options here we have to select three options option a isdnbri lines at each district office for simultaneous voice and data traffic we haven't covered that yet so we don't know that atm connectivity for all offices carrying both voice and data traffic now we talked about atm how was one of the older ways we connected our branch offices along with frame relay and leased lines i'm gonna go ahead and say no because that's old and old

means expensive option c point-to-point leased lines to connect each district office to headquarters well again lease lines old expensive no get that out of here a converged network with qos maybe we like qos and they have voice calls so qos is important to make sure our voice calls are prioritized we just talked about that internet connectivity for each office yeah yeah we need that now why do we need that and it was in the first paragraph up here it says a single internet connection is installed at the hq or headquarters office district offices or branch

offices receive access to this internet connection across the wan what does that mean what means here like let me show you hq they have one internet connection and then we have our district offices and these are connected to the hq office over a private lan notice these district offices these branch offices do not have an internet connection they only have a wan connection back to hq so when they want to access the internet which they often probably will they'll actually go across the private lan to hq and then use the hq's internet connection this might

seem weird but this is actually a very common thing becoming less common as the days go on but it is a common thing doing this will give the organization more control over security and everything but we won't get into that but again the goal of this question was to reduce the cost of this wan so i guess one of the ways we could reduce that cost is install a dedicated internet connection or dia connection dedicated internet access at each branch so let's let's select that option i think it's a good option and the last one

an internet vpn to provide inner office connectivity well yeah if we have a public internet access or dia we're gonna need that vpn we're gonna need that if you want that connection to the branch offices so b and c we rolled out let me rule them out again here we're really sure about isdn but you know what i'm feeling good about the qos let's select that and let's show our answer boom nailed it got it uh there is a great explanation here if you want to check it out i'll let you let me remove my

stuff here pause and read but if you got that right you're killer you're awesome and if you didn't that's okay this stuff is new and it's not easy and question number two here we go which of the following statements regarding vpns are true select two choices ready set pause the video and go all right welcome back let's see how you did so option a vpns route traffic over dedicated leased lines theoretically they can but there's really not a reason to because it's a dedicated lease line why do you need vpn for traffic that will never

hit the public internet so that'll make no sense data is transmitted in clear text that means not encrypted and that's not true so no vpns typically cost less to implement than a traditional wan dang we know that to be true so i want to go and select that bad boy an isd and terminal adapter can be used as an endpoint device terms you may not have heard yet so we're going to skip that workstations do not typically need client software to use a site-to-site vpn well let's think about that if the network devices at our

site are handling the vpn connection then our computers don't need to connect a vpn it's handled by the routers or our firewall or whatever's doing it so i'm going to select that option and that was two let's check it out got it again if you want to see the explanation it's right here pause the video and go now if you want to see more questions like that as you prepare for your ccna check out boson xm in the links below they are what i use to prep for my cisco exams can't recommend them more and

i get another sponsor of this video and they make this free course possible so show them some love click on it tell them i sent you and whoo man we covered a lot in this video we covered a lot of wand technologies and we have more of a holistic picture of how our networks look in the enterprise we have our campus network we have our data centers network and now we see the when network how they connect to each other in our next video we're going to talk about the soho or the small office home

office which is becoming more popular nowadays given the current situation anyways that's all i got if you like this video don't forget to hit that like button it does help it helps more people discover this type of training and this type of content and if you want to see more of it hit that subscribe button i'm posting a ccna video here for free every week well that's all i got guys i'll catch y'all later [Music] you