Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Multitenancy Guide, Releases 26.x and Later

PDF

Multitenancy

Updated: June 21, 2026

Want to summarize with AI?

Log in

Explains the Cisco SD-WAN multitenancy deployment model, where multiple tenants share the same infrastructure while maintaining logical isolation through dedicated resources.

Multitenancy is a Cisco SD-WAN deployment model that

  • allows multiple tenants to share the same Cisco SD-WAN infrastructure,

  • assigns dedicated logical resources (such as controllers and organization names) to each tenant for isolation, and

  • supports automatic or flexible placement of Cisco SD-WAN Controller during tenant onboarding.

Types of multitenancy assignments

There are two types of multitenancy assignments in Cisco SD-WAN:

  • Automatic tenant placement: Cisco SD-WAN Manager automatically assigns controllers to tenants using an internal algorithm during onboarding.

  • Manual tenant placement : You can manually select the pair of SD-WAN Controllers for a tenant based on utilization and resource availability.

Manual tenant placement

With manual tenant placement, you can select controller pairs during onboarding, view controller capacity (such as tenants, edge devices, CPU, and memory), and migrate tenants or add SD-WAN Controllers to optimize utilization.

Availability and configuration

From Cisco vManage Release 20.9.1, you can use manual tenant placement as an optional feature. By default, SD-WAN Manager performs automatic tenant placement, but you can enable manual placement to gain more control during onboarding.

SD-WAN Controller capacity limits

A multitenant SD-WAN Controller supports up to 24 tenants and 1000 tenant WAN edge devices across all tenants. During onboarding, the network administrator must select a pair of SD-WAN Controllers that can host one more tenant and connect to the tenant’s forecasted number of WAN edge devices.

Optimization and migration

If a tenant adds more devices than forecast and the assigned SD-WAN Controllers cannot support them, the network administrator migrates the tenant to another SD-WAN Controller pair that has capacity. If no SD-WAN Controller pair has enough capacity, the network administrator migrates other tenants to different SD-WAN Controllers to free up resources and balance utilization. If this optimization still doesn’t create enough capacity, the network administrator adds a new SD-WAN Controller pair and then migrates the tenant there.

Automatic tenant placement

With automatic tenant placement you can rely on the system to assign SD-WAN Controller pairs during onboarding, adjust forecasts if existing SD-WAN Controllers can handle more WAN Edge devices, or re-onboard/add controllers if capacity is exceeded.

Availability

Cisco supports automatic tenant placement in vManage in Release 20.8.x and earlier.

Algorithm criteria

The internal algorithm assigns SD-WAN Controllers by considering three factors:

  • the number of tenant WAN edge devices forecasted for the tenant,

  • the number of tenants already served by each SD-WAN Controller pair, and

  • the number of WAN edge devices already connected to each SD-WAN Controller pair.