Solution Benefits and Overview

When building any Juniper campus fabric, you must always plan for the integration of a WAN router since we do not assume deployment in an air-gapped environment. You must be able to have the fabric connected to the Internet. Therefore, WAN router integration is a mandatory part of the fabric installation procedure.

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There are several ways to integrate a WAN router, depending on the role it performs and whether it is deployed as a standalone device or as part of a redundant design, either as a traditional router or as a stateful firewall.

For a lab design, you can choose to use an MX Series Router, a Session Smart Router or an SRX Series Firewall or any third-party router or firewall. Just attach the device to the first two fabric switches such as the service block switch, core switch or collapsed core switch.

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A more robust design intended for production grade fabrics is to use a redundant pair of WAN routers as shown. A third-party firewall vendor must provide stateful redundancy synchronization because the fabric may be designed to use other links to forward traffic. The vendor-specific implementation is usually a pair of redundant links between the firewall devices.

Figure 1: Redundant WAN Router Fabric Design A diagram of a network Description automatically generated

It is always highly recommended to review the implementation of the WAN router as part of the campus fabric rollout planning. There needs to be a creation level of feature support to make this a successful design and there are different flavors to choose. This JVDE reviews the integration options and guides customers to select the appropriate method for integration.