Item: HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution as our method for connecting our sites via SD-WAN. Primarily our environment is a fully meshed environment, which is an easy to configure option with the HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution. It's a very reliable product which allows for our high uptime demands that has come with an amazing customer vendor relationship.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Linking multiple sites quickly and efficiently
High uptime
HA Configurations with active active load balancing
Fully SaaS controller that is only dependent upon WAN devices having internet access (which they should be plugged into)

Cons

There are a lot of menus for items to hide under
Often there are alarms that are false positives due to bugs in the code - these are usually rectified in the next patch but that seems to be a common occurrence with updates
Can only have 7 "BIOs" - which are effectively policies that you use to choose how traffic is handled in terms of routing and QoS
Devices throughput is capped by Aruba licensing meaning that's an additional concern you'll have to monitor and take into consideration when choosing ISPs.
Alerts sometimes don't tell you things you'd like to know (like when a site is nearing its bandwidth cap)

Return on Investment

It's simplified and expedites traffic by building and managing tunnels between all sites
Does have integrations with Zscaler Internet Access which is a product we've recently onboarded
Has a semi high learning curve as it can do a lot (suffers from the same issue as Aruba ClearPass where it can do so much which makes it a daunting tool to learn, but a powerful one)

Usability

The product and its management as a whole are worth investigating for any kind of people interested in looking at new SD-WAN appliances. The devices possess a lot of capability for granularity which makes them much more advanced than other products I've worked with in the past. Ironically, for all the granularity though, this product is held back that you can ultimately only have 7 different policies for routing decisions. We've ran into instances where we wanted two sites to only share certain routes between each other (through the use of tags which are basically an arbitrary way to say this traffic is special) but then we had to collapse some of our routing decisions in order to make a specific route table for these two to be able which felt like a step back in the advanced routing decisions we had previously made.

Alternatives Considered

Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN

Prisma SD-WAN is a very simple solution to configure and maintain (so much to the point that in that environment, I questioned if my skills as a Network Engineer were needed). However it worked almost primarily on its own with very little input, by default and at the time of review had no way to do fully mesh (which was desired), and constantly suffered from memory leak. Its integrations were through the use of obscure tags and suffered from a "when it works - it works but when it doesn't - it doesn't and you don't know why" mentality. In contrast, HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN gives you a lot of insight into what is going on with the site, the integrations are done easily within Orchestrator (the control plane), and ultimately the product is typically a very stable product with many ways to configure and tweak the solution to fit your business needs.

Key Insights

Do you think HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN's feature set?

Yes

Did HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN again?

Yes

Other Software Used

HPE Aruba Networking ClearPass Policy Manager, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX), Zscaler Internet Access, Zscaler Private Access, HPE Aruba Networking Switches

Likelihood to Recommend

The HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN excel in environments where you do a lot of your East - West segmentation is done by another device. While these devices can do basic firewall functions, it's their not true intent. If you can group what you want your traffic to do into a few basic groups, this product will work great (think all Guest Traffic gets low priority and sent directly to the internet, VoIP gets sent directly out but high priority, and most internal traffic gets medium throughput). There are ways to really tinker reach the desired goals but this can be a double-edged sword of those configurations being forgotten about. There is also the use of templating which if you have a larger environment, this product will make some normal configs (think SNMP) more streamlined. The units are also highly reliable, built with HA in mind - our company has only experienced a single version that had a memory leak that we just needed to remember to reboot every 90 days while we waited for the next update (which came in like 4 months).

Comments

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HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WANs are a solid SD-WAN solution with a single bigger flaw