Item: Cisco Meraki SD-WAN
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki SD-WAN

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

all our sites have internet circuits only, so the use case for Meraki SD-WAN is just about distributing traffic between primary and backup circuit. There are some sites where weekly backups are staurating primary link, so we are forcing this traffic over the secondary link. Some sites are using SD-WAN plus license too.

Pros and Cons

Pros

easy to implement
decent analytics and telemetry
Security embedded into the solution

Cons

AutoVPN sites to site firewall rules needs to be improved
there is no logging or any insights which would be able to tell you what are the hit counts or actual usage for site to site firewall rules
SD-WAN plus license includes Smart breakout which has only few applications and those do not work properly, so it is quite useless
VPN exclusions (local internet breakout) for TCP/UDP type of traffic can not be specified with port ranges
VPN exclusions (local internet breakout) can be defined only for destinations, but not the sources. It is policy based routing which should support also Source definition

Return on Investment

like with every Meraki product, this can be implemented and maintained with junior network engineer or even a server guy with just basic network background
no need to hire full team of network admins
price of equipment is very attractive

Simplified Management

True zero-touch provisioning allows the quickest
and simplest way reduce total WAN costs and deliver the
desired level of performance for VoIP and
business critical cloud applications

Integrations with other Cisco products

Cisco Meraki MX and Cisco Umbrella

Meraki MX + SD WAN + AutoVPN + Umbrella is the golden standard when you want to go Meraki route and have internet connectivity secured. AutoVPN will give you site to site connectivity as well as connectivity to the cloud (vMX extends SD-WAN to Azure/Amazon)

Scalability

product scales as long as you scale the hardware. Bigger sites require better MX appliances which cost more. For more powerful appliance the license cost more.

Alternatives Considered

Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN and VMware SD-WAN

user friendly, cheap and integrates well with other Meraki and Cisco products

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Meraki SD-WAN delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Meraki SD-WAN's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Meraki SD-WAN live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Meraki SD-WAN go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Meraki SD-WAN again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

small, medium enterprises, which can benefit from auto-magical AutoVPN, easy to setup and maintain. It is basically DMVPN Phase1 without the need to configure anything.
For internet traffic, loadbalancing and traffic preferences can do most of the job that you would need.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

The simplest SD-WAN available