Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator is a cloud hosted, multi-tenant management SaaS offering, which could be leveraged by Citrix partners to offer managed SD-WAN services to their customers. The multi-tenant SD-WAN management framework provides Citrix partners with workflows for customer onboarding, network configuration, provisioning, network health and usage monitoring and basic troubleshooting.
SD-WAN Orchestrator supports a hierarchical multi-tenancy architecture where the partners can onboard the end customers directly or have some of their associated partners manage a subset of the end customers. SD-WAN Orchestrator enables partners to onboard their customers on a click of a button. Role based access control is supported whereby during the onboarding process, the customer administrators can be assigned specific roles like network-admin with full access control or a different role with read-only access.
The Zero-touch deployment (ZTD) functionality enables the partners to configure the customer network before the devices are shipped to the customers, and have the config dynamically and securely get mapped to physical or virtual appliances when plugged in and powered on, without needing to have network engineers / experts at the branch offices.
The provider gets to create configuration templates, which could potentially be shared with some or all customers, as needed. Site, LAN and WAN templates are supported currently. Rich configuration options are provided for the provider to configure each customer network by creating each individual site and its related network and SD-WAN configuration.
There are three different dashboards provided to the partners:
- Provider Dashboard
- Customer Dashboard
- Site Dashboard
The Provider Dashboard offers a bird’s eye view of all the SD-WAN customers being managed by a given service provider.
A color-coded health snapshot is provided for each customer, with a provision to drill-down into any of them for customer specific details.
The Customer Dashboard provides a bird’s eye view of the customer’s network in terms of health and usage across all the sites.
The dashboard captures a summary of the network-wide alerts, usage trends such as Top Apps and Top Sites, and a global view of the network with all the customer sites depicted on a world map. The color code of each site reflects the health. The network could alternately be viewed using the List View too.
On the other hand, the site dashboard summarizes the health and usage details associated with a given site. The dashboard captures a summary of the site-level alerts, usage trends such as Top Apps and Top App Categories, the virtual path connections associated with a site, and the device details.
All the virtual path connections associated with a site (E.g.: London in the image above) are displayed with suitable color-coding to reflect the health of each connection. Health metrics and graphical trends around availability, latency, loss, jitter and throughput are displayed for the selected virtual path connection.
Similarly, reports can be viewed at various levels: provider, customer and site. The Provider Reports provide visibility into Inventory, Health and Usage Patterns, aggregated across all the customers being managed by a Provider. The provider also gets to review all the events and alerts generated across all their customers. The provider gets to review cross-customer usage trends such as ‘Top Applications’, ‘Top Application Categories’, etc.,
The reports at the customer level are aggregated across all the sites in the network.
