What is Overlay Management Protocol (OMP) and which components use it?

• A. OMP is used by data-plane tunneling; vManage uses it
• B. OMP is protocol used by vSmart and vBond to distribute VPN reachability, routing, and policy information to SD-WAN edges
• C. OMP is a management protocol for vManage
• D. OMP is used to encrypt data plane

Answer: (B)

OMP is the control-plane protocol that handles the overlay by distributing VPN reachability, routing, and policy information from the SD-WAN controllers to the edge devices. In Cisco SD-WAN, vSmart and vBond use OMP to push how to reach remote sites, routing decisions, and the defined policies to each SD-WAN edge (vEdge). This enables the edges to form the overlay tunnels and apply the intended forwarding behavior across the network.

It’s not about data-plane encryption or tunneling itself—that’s handled by the IPsec tunnels that carry the actual traffic. It isn’t a management protocol used by the central manager (vManage) to configure devices. The key role of OMP is to propagate the overlay’s reachability, routing, and policy information from the control plane to the edge devices.