Cisco Validated Design Program (CVD)

Before the holidays I had posted a couple blogs about the Network Design Process - Part I - Part II.

What I didn't include in either of these guidelines was "Use Best Practices". This was on purpose because each network design is different. While there is a methodology that can be applied to the process, each business/customer has different needs. Now, each customer has needs that can be organized into templates that can be used repeatedly. However, templates address a specific customer while best practices address a broader audience.

Cisco has recently been creating more best practice documentation. For years Cisco has provided the very detailed Solution Reference Network Design (SRND) Guides. These are high quality documents that provide best practice designs for a variety of issues from Enterprise Branch Architecture Design Overview to Deploying IPv6 in Campus Networks to Cisco Video Surveillance Stream Manager Hybrid Design Guide" (not too many downloads on that one probably).

Now Cisco has taken this program a step farther with the Cisco Validated Design Program (CVD).

CVD is broken into CVD I and CVD II. CVD I provides design validation and proof of concept testing. These designs are given less-rigorous review inside Cisco's labs, but still come with the Cisco stamp of approval. There are more CVD I guides since they require less testing and validation.

CVD II is where Cisco conducts in-depth lab testing to produce designs with "zero observable operation impacting defects within the given test parameters". This is a high bar for a design. Cisco includes the actual test results in each document to show the test performed and the defects observed.

There are fewer CVD II guides since the testing is more involved, but these guides provide a higher level of assurance and can be used as more of a complete solution than CVD I. Since CVD II documents have a higher level of quality they can be used as a "design baseline that provides a foundational list of test coverage to accelerate a customer deployment". In English, that means the base network has already been tested so you can speed up your project. ;-)

Cisco Validated Design and the Solution Reference Network Design (SRND) Guides are great best practice resources that should be in all network engineer bookmarks.