FEATUREDApplication Development & Modernization
PETER WELCHER | Solutions Architect
This blog is part of a series covering various SD-Access topics.
Previous blogs in this series:
There are many great resources for learning more about SD-Access, and the purpose of this blog is to point you toward some of them.
I’m frugal (my wife sometimes says “cheap”), so I may favor the low / no-cost options.
Books
- SD-Access for Industry Verticals (free Cisco e-book)
Overview of SD-Access
Here is a great SDA overview Cisco Live 2024 slide deck full of key info, Cisco Live login needed to access it: https://www.ciscolive.com/c/dam/r/ciscolive/global-event/docs/2024/pdf/BRKENS-2502.pdf
Courses
Note that some of the Cisco learning courses have self-paced online versions (usually at lower cost), as well as the instructor-led versions. They usually are named with the same acronyms. The beginning parts of the following URL’s tell you where to search.
- (Cisco apparently had an ENSDA course but I can no longer find references to it)
The ISESDA course might be useful as a pre-requisite for people who want to brush up or build key ISE skills that SD-Access will use.
Cisco Live
Cisco Live On-Demand presentations are a valuable free resource. They tend to age well, and the diagrams can really help. They can also be terse, which is where a book can provide more detailed explanations.
I usually go to the following page, specifically the most recent one or two Cisco Live sessions in the U.S. (more presentations than elsewhere), and then search by keyword: Cisco Live OnDemand Library. Having said that, 2019 and 2020 were great years for lots of detailed SDA presentations.
Cisco Live 2019 had a LOT of good SD-Access presentations. If you go to BRKCRS-2810, the fourth slide provides a diagram of many, if not all, the other 2019 SD-Access presentations. Great idea! Subsequent presentations also tend to include “Learning Maps.”
Just for fun and in case it saves you time, here’s the 2019 search I did. You may well need to log in first, then follow that link. (Yeah, getting close to “LMGTFY” here?)
Cisco Live 2020 was pretty solid on SDA. Here’s the search URL. BRKCRS-2810 slide 5 is the SD-Access map of the 2020 presentations.
I found the COVID era Cisco Live presentations a bit thinner on tech content, more summary and marketing-ish. (Perhaps 2020 to 2022).
Searching 2023 and 2024 Cisco Live SDA sessions may be useful to you, and provide more recent content. If that isn’t enough to keep you busy for a while, some of the presentations found by searching on the text “SD-Access” or “DNA Center” are also relevant.
(The tech checkbox “SD-Access” has no matches for 2023 ???. My lesson learned over the years re Cisco Live presentations: searching on text matches in titles seems more productive. The canned categories may be hit or miss, probably up to the presenter to remember to pick one or more categories, and their choices historically do not align well with how my brain works)
And some “ISE” never hurts, especially ISE plus SDA.
The following from 2024 is handy: SD-Access Learning Map.
Cisco Web Pages
Searching cisco.com for SD-Access deployment or design, and the same for DNA Center, is the most obvious place to start. I included the Cisco links I’ve found most useful in the prior blogs in this series.
The SD-Access Distributed Campus Deployment Guide (CVD) (July 2019) is good.
The Software-Defined Access Medium and Large Site Fabric Provisioning Guide (Oct 2019) is also good but covers less (it looks like it is an earlier version).
Cisco Community page of SDA resources – plenty of links!
Bear in mind that SD-Access now includes extended nodes and policy extended nodes – in good part, to support legacy switches and IOT industrial switches, etc. Also, the micro-switches, which would be extended nodes.
