Cisco Meraki SD-WAN is a cloud-managed solution that simplifies and secures wide area networking across branch, campus, and remote locations. Built on Meraki’s dashboard, it delivers centralized visibility, automation, and traffic optimization without the complexity of traditional WAN deployments. The solution improves application performance by dynamically routing traffic based on real-time conditions, integrating advanced security, and providing seamless multicloud connectivity. With support…
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VMware SD-WAN
Score 8.6 out of 10
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VMware SD-WAN (formerly VeloCloud) aims to deliver high-performance, reliable branch access to cloud services, private data centers, and SaaS-based enterprise applications. VeloCloud was acquired by VMware in 2018.
At the time we made our decision to move forward with VeloCloud, Cisco Viptela and Cisco Meraki were the two players we compared against. Cisco's offerings were very customizable when using Viptela, but there was a big learning curve to implement. Meraki at the time was a lot …
I believe it is well suited for "pop-up" offices of a small number of people. 5 to 10 is ideal. It can be setup with a minimum of involvement from the IT infrastructure group. It is a very simple way to connect a remote site securely and quickly with the confidence that the connection will be stable. I believe it is less suited for a large organization requiring complex routing and routing protocols. It only works with Meraki endpoints and so there must be Meraki firewalls at both ends. It cannot be used with IPSEC tunnels
VMware SD WAN is a great solution for tying multiple locations together that are not physically located close. The link aggregation used in the technology allows for quicker failover to redundant connections, which makes the surface traffic seem to be uninterrupted. If planning to connect multiple locations while utilizing the existing internet, Veloclouds SDWAN provides stable and accurate aggregation of connections that provide a good sense of stability for the price.
I really like the firewalls and the access points, like the wireless ones. From a wireless access point perspective, we recently moved to the new MR57s, multi-gig bandwidth as well as Wi-Fi 6, which helps users connect wirelessly regardless of where they sit in the office. The experience they get doesn’t matter wherever they move—it’s fantastic. So we’ve moved from the previous iteration of Meraki Access Points to the new iteration, like two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a major shift in the user experience.
I personally think that this particular place is on the logging side. I have seen where the event log is that what they call in terms of capturing all the log events is the area which I personally feel can actually be improved. Even this could be similar, like how I said about packet capture where you could have a flexibility of having a high level information or deep level regardless you should have that kind of option where you could also see the logging site as granular as per the requirement. So that's the area which I think is a bit little behind compared to other vendors.
Because so far the solution showed great stability during the time, easy to use and deploy. There is still room for improvements like adding a smarter way to manage the policies to apply to the tunneled traffic, today the way to configure and manage them is quite old style, It would be better an "object" oriented way to create them.
VMware SD-WAN has great usability. We have had a positive experience with the solution. It has helped solved a number of issues with our network such as visibility in user usage, application usage, and prioritizing critical application network traffic. VMware SD-WAN user interface is also very easy to understand and configure.
Fast and efficient. The only issue currently is that the support is only overseas support and not in South Africa, which causes delays in resolution for some cases. Escalating issues is quite simple and the opening of new cases from the dashboard is easy. I have never had a support issue that could not be resolved.
There are still some glitches that need to be worked out. As an example, I rebooted a device at one of our branch locations and it just died. That should never have happened, and I've only seen this happen when a company needs to improve hardware on some of their lower-end models.
We did a very stringent valuation a few years ago. And we evaluated probably about a dozen suppliers on paper that we evaluate just by capabilities. And, we of some other business criteria, and we whittled that down to a list of five. And out of those five, we brought four of those into our lab environment where we ran approximately 350 different test cases on, we really beat on it pretty heavily. And some of those other suppliers would've been companies like Fortinet Versa Networks Silver Peak, which is now owned by Hewlett Packard.
At the time we made our decision to move forward with VeloCloud, Cisco Viptela and Cisco Meraki were the two players we compared against. Cisco's offerings were very customizable when using Viptela, but there was a big learning curve to implement. Meraki at the time was a lot simpler, but we needed the ability to customize some features in order to implement SD-WAN in our environment. VeloCloud was the perfect solution during our POC as it satisfied our needs.
With the implementation of Cisco Meraki SD-WAN on our new site, this has enabled us to optimize the bandwidth of our 3 links. Thanks to this, updates pushed by Microsoft Intune, such as Microsoft CRM operations, are running smoothly. The same applies to SAP and our Teams meetings. And I almost forgot our Cisco telephone system.
Cisco Meraki SD-WAN gave us a new perspective on SDN, ZTP and other automation tools we didn't have before
The sizing of Meraki MX series cannot compete very large and robust networks, only if we use virtual appliances. In this case, I would recommend on other vendors like Fortinet
Ease of deployment: the amount of time saved when adding additional sites to the solution, especially when you have a profile already built and when you add a new VC you just associate that profile with that appliance. Again, in a matter of minutes, you can have a new site up and running.
Since there is not true firewall built-in, you would have to either purchase a third-party firewall or the virtual firewall that is supported by Velocloud.
