use case

Verifying Network Equivalency Before and After Network Vendor Migration

Verifying network behavior after a migration can present several challenges, but one of the hardest parts is ensuring that the migrated network behaves in the same manner and provides the same service and connectivity.

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Today’s networks are highly complex with hundreds or thousands of interconnected devices and dependencies. Trying to manually verify that a migration does not cause unintended changes in connectivity is nearly impossible. While there are many tools to assist during the migration process, ensuring configurations interact as intended is extremely difficult because NetOps teams lack visibility into all possible paths a packet can take.

Without knowing all possible paths prior to a migration, there’s no way to ensure that the same paths exist post-migration. The tools provided by vendors to assist in migration cannot assess multivendor network behavior and identify deviations from expected norms. Also, they cannot verify that the integration has not introduced compatibility issues across the network. Forward Networks’ digital twin technology can streamline this process and provide enterprises with mathematical certainty that their network behavior is unchanged post-migration.

Forward Enterprise Verifies Network Connectivity and Security Posture Remain Intact

Forward Networks’ digital twin gathers configuration and L2-L7 state data from network devices and public cloud platforms to create a mathematical model of the network, including all possible traffic paths and connectivity. Information is collected in regular snapshots that allow before and after comparisons.

This data can also be used to ensure network equivalency during a migration. Network equivalency means that any end hosts attached to the network will not observe a change in connectivity. This happens when all hosts and gateways have the same address/ subnet assignment. Proving network equivalency requires verifying that:

All hosts/gateways that are in the same L2 domain will remain in the same L2 domain.
Address and subnets assigned to hosts/gateways remain the same.
The connectivity matrix between hosts/gateways remains the same.
The connectivity matrix from hosts/gateways to outside subnets remains the same.

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Forward Networks can provide this proof because it discovers all hosts, gateways, and L2 domains (See Figure 1) and computes full reachability from a host or group of hosts to all IP addresses (See Figure 2).

Figure 2: Host Group Reachability Matrix

By testing host group reachability before and after a migration, Forward Networks’ digital twin can verify that connectivity and security zones have remained the same. In the example below, Network A and Network B are compared before and after. By running a simple script, engineers produce a connectivity verification table. Any deviations in the before and after matrix indicate changes in connectivity that need to be addressed. When the tables are the same, network equivalency is proved (See Figure 3).

Figure 3: Network Equivalency Before and After Migration

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By comparing the behavior of pre-conversion and post-conversion networks, they can ensure that the end hosts and the traffic using the network observe no change in the underlying infrastructure. Forward Networks delivers peace of mind by enabling organizations to deterministically demonstrate that network connectivity, segmentation, and behavior remain consistent before and after a vendor conversion without straining the resources of the NetOps team.