Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

When I was working at BT Telecom, we used Cisco SD-WAN for IP telephony.

In my current position in this company, we use this solution to classify network traffic and send the IP packets to the appropriate link.

I have found the solution's main features are its ability to be customized, network traffic classification, and has a wide range of features that can be set.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

I have found the solution scalable. We have approximately 10 clients.

I was satisfied with the technical support.

The installation is not easy. If you have experience and it is not your first time doing the installation, it can be easier. Additionally, there are a lot of different parameters to set and you have to know exactly what the parameters do. From this perspective, it is not easy. There are a lot of possibilities to do fine-tuning with the SD-WAN settings.

If you were to set all the parameters all at once it would take a lot of time. It is best to fine-tune them over time. This is not a negative factor, having more options allows flexibility.

I would recommend a system integration company that has the knowledge of how to operate the system to do the implementation.

The price of the solution is the only negative factor, it is much more expensive compared with the Cisco Meraki SD-WAN solution.

I have evaluated Cisco Meraki SD-WAN.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Cisco SD-WAN a ten out of ten.

We are resellers and integrators.

It's a complete solution with many security features.

It integrates well with other Cisco solutions.

Customers require features that are secure for endpoints, on-premises, and for the cloud.

We could provision Cisco Umbrella to respond to the security requirements.

They need to make provisions in the platform cloud with tools. In the cloud environment, it is very easy to enable the solution with Umbrella.

They should configure to provision other devices and many endpoints to deploy the SD-WAN with security.

I would like a feature included for the prevention and inspection of data to implement. 

I have been working with Cisco SD-WAN for three years.

We are using the Viptela version.

We had issues with the stability only one time when we integrated Viptella SD-WAN with Cisco Umbrella. After reading all of the documentation, we have not had any issues with the stability.

Cisco SD-WAN is scalable.

Cisco technical support is very good. They are responsive to my questions and send me all of the information needed.

They respond quickly.

We are also using Meraki.

Meraki is more suited to small companies, whereas Cisco is more for larger enterprise companies.

We have a hybrid deployment. We have clients who prefer the cloud and others who want an on-premises deployment.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy.

The time for deployment depends on the size of the company and its requirements. There are many factors. It can take two months to six months to complete.

We have a team of five people. One project manager, two specialist engineers, and two basic engineers, who maintain this solution.

Cisco is more expensive than FortiGate.

We also evaluated Fortinet FortiGate for our clients. For customers, it is mainly a decision based on pricing and technical options.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it. Technical support is very strong and provides high-level assistance. They have knowledgeable technicians with engineers present.

Overall, it's a very good solution.

I would rate Cisco SD-WAN a nine out of ten. 

We use it to manage hospitals and clinics in my country.

It has improved our connection and bandwidth.

I like the feature that lets you transfer from old devices to new devices without changing the hardware and subscription.

The price could be better. From a technical side, and everything's working smoothly. Cisco SD-WAN could be cheaper. 

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for about one year.

It's very good and stable compared to the others.

It's scalable. We have around 250 sites around Jordan.

Technical support is good. We don't have any issue with their performance.

The initial setup and deployment were straightforward.

I implemented this solution by myself.

It's expensive. If you compare Cisco with Fortinet and Juniper, you'll find that Cisco is more expensive than other vendors.

We don't have Sympatico or Versa in my country. We just have Cisco, Juniper, and Fortinet. But Fortinet doesn't have complete distribution, and the switching solution is very weak. We needed a solution that integrates with others, and we think that Cisco helped. Fortinet doesn't have all the switches, and they have some issues with statistics. This is why we chose Cisco.

I would advise potential users to try Cisco and see if they offer more for their enterprise needs. I would recommend Cisco SD-WAN to new users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco SD-WAN a nine.

We are a solution provider and Cisco SD-WAN is one of the products that we implement for our customers. I am a system integrator.

We use this product for zero-disk provisioning at branch offices. The controllers are at a central location and are used to manage the branches.

The most valuable features are zero-disk provisioning and link load balancing on an application basis. In the case of link load balancing, if an application is not working properly on the primary link, it may be fine on the secondary one. This means that if the first link goes down then it may still be accessible, which is a very good feature.

The process of onboarding the vSmart, vBond, and vManage should be improved to make it easier to manage in general. 

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for one year.

Stability-wise, it is a good product and it works very well.

This is a scalable solution. There are between 1,000 and 1,500 users.

I have been in contact with technical support and my experience with them has been fine.

The length of time required for deployment depends on the scenario, but it usually takes between two and three days to set up.

As a system integrator, I deploy this solution myself.

We need a couple of engineers at headquarters to maintain it, and we don't usually need anybody at the remote sites. Normally, it's plug-and-play.

Licensing is on a subscription basis.

In summary, this is a good product and we plan to continue using it in the future. It is one that I definitely recommend.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The security of the solution is pretty good.

We like the user interface. It's fairly easy to navigate.

The user experience is pretty good.

We've found that the solution is easy to deploy.

The solution is very popular with many vendors.

Overall, our experience has been very positive. So far, so good. We don't have many complaints about its capabilities.

We've worked with BetterCloud, and found the security to be better than what is offered by Cisco. The user interface is nicer as well. Cisco should look at what they are doing and try to replicate it a bit.

When it comes to adding more security features, you need to add more RAM.

The pricing could be a bit better. When a customer transfers from a traditional WAN to SD-WAN, the subscription price is one big problem for them.

The solution is a bit buggy, which makes it slightly unstable.

The provisioning could be easier during deployment. Some vendors say they can handle provisioning, however, it differs from vendor to vendor.

I've been working with the solution for more than one year at this point. It is likely closer to two years now.

We do find that the solution can be a bit buggy. The more complex the setup is, the more bugs we seem to find. There seem to be many bugs in the software.

The web GUI is easy to deploy, however, when we deploy a whole network for a customer, we can see how they run inside the GUI. We've had to open cases with technical support to help us deal with issues that arise.

We have medium-sized clients, largely based in the retail industry.

We've dealt with technical support in the past to help us deal with a few bugs. They are pretty professional.

I'm working for a partner in Vietnam. They have many vendors, including Aruba and Meraki Cisco.

The initial setup isn't too complex. It's pretty straightforward. A company shouldn't have too many issues with the setup.

I've done it a few times at this point, and every time, day by day, it gets easier and easier.

The solution is a bit expensive. There's a big jump from WAN to SD-WAN which customers don't like.

We are a Cisco partner.

I've worked with a variety of different versions of the solution. I'm not always using the latest version.

Cisco is a very professional organization. They offer good support.

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for data centers with several providers. We also use the solution for branch offices. We have used it on 20 branch offices in one instance and the other instance has about 90 remote sites.

The security features are very good. We really like the application routing, for example.

The initial setup is quite simple.

The solution offers very good documentation.

Technical support is quite helpful.

The product is very scalable.

There are a lot of exciting features coming out very soon which we are looking forward to working with.

The security features could be improved.

The solution needs to offer better stability.

The product could have improved flexibility.

I've been using the solution for about thirteen months. It's been just over a year at this point, so it hasn't been too long.

The solution could have better stability. It's not ideal right now. It could be quite a bit better.

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it should be able to do so rather easily.

We typically work with small and medium-sized organizations. I'm not sure if the companies we work with intend to expand their usage in the future or not.

Technical support for the product is quite good. We're satisfied with the level of support we receive from them. 

The documents, manuals, and community support on offer are very good.

The initial setup is not complex. We found it to be straightforward and easy.

The deployment took about six months for one project and a few months for another.

You need about four people for deployment and maintenance tasks.

We tend to implement this solution for our clients if they require it of us.

We didn't look at other options before choosing this solution.

We're partners for Cisco. We're resellers and implementers.

For the routers, we are using versions 73.2 and 16.12.3. We use both cloud and on-premises deployment models.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product at an eight. We've mostly been quite happy with it.

Normally, you use it for the internet connection.

The orchestration on the VPN connection between remote locations is a fantastic feature. I used it some time ago. 

The bandwidth limitations would be good to remove, but it is a policy and license situation for Cisco because the cost is very high. 

It would be good to have OTP implemented with VRF. It can have support for EIGRP Over the Top (OTP) VRF. I saw some limitations in regards to the VRF protocol and the advertisement between VRF configuration. EIGRP Over the Top basically was quite limited with the VRF configuration. If you wanted to do rollback in VRF by using the EIGRP OTP protocol, the formation was not populated across. Cisco got back and confirmed that it is a configuration that I need to wait for until the next release, which is going to happen in one year. 

Cisco documentation is not the way it used to be before. It just gives an easy way to configure, but it doesn't go into the details of the configuration. The information that you need is there, but sometimes you want to go further and get more information, but the information is quite limited. It would be good to cover a few business cases or configuration cases. They used to be there in the past.

I have been using this solution for around seven years.

It is good. There are some nice elements about it, but there are a few difficulties, and it is always an improvement process.

It is good. You can scale as much as you want, but you have a limitation of the license. 
You cannot go further than a certain number of licenses. I can only have 15 locations or so because it would scale the price.

Technical support is good and always handy to give the answers to the questions that you have about how to use it. They always find the issues and the resolutions of the problems that you have.

I am currently using Fortinet SD-WAN because it is less expensive. It is not as expensive as Cisco SD-WAN. That is the reason we switched from Cisco SD-WAN to Fortinet SD-WAN.

It is not that complex. If you concur with the previous configurations that you need to perform a VPN tunnel and everything related to it, then it is not that complex.

The deployment duration depends on how you implement it and the complexity of the connections. If you are having a full mesh configuration, it will take you quite a long time. It depends on the infrastructure that you need to connect to. For a basic operation, it might take you five hours.

I don't use any integrator or retailer at all. The way they have implemented SD-WAN is that they just provide the device. The devices are handed to me to be implemented and configured.

For maintaining the product, you just need to monitor the connection to the platform through the web portal. Overall, you need to dedicate two hours per day to assess the functionality of the devices and implementing them. It could be as easy as one day or five hours. It could also get very complicated depending on the configuration that you are doing. So, if you want to go fancy in the configuration, it can take you easily one weekend deploying the configuration. It depends on how complicated you want to go. I would say as long as you keep it simple, it will take you pretty much three hours or two hours for implementing it.

It is expensive. The license limitation is there in terms of bandwidth. Basically, Cisco is always good in terms of performance and related things. However, if you want to have a license, for example, for 100 Mbps, they charge you because of their 100 Mbps. If you want to go without the license of 300 Mbps, it is a bandwidth license as well. This is not happening with other vendors. That is the reason why we moved away from Cisco. The bill gets a little bit high.

I do remember that one time we were trying to increase the bandwidth for at least five devices, and the license got as high as 20-grand for five devices, only for the license. It was expensive for us at the time. Our company is not a big company, but it is a solid company. The price was very high, and we moved away from Cisco because of the price.

I would recommend it only if you have the budget to buy and implement a good solution with Cisco. Otherwise, unfortunate for Cisco, there are other vendors. They do the job pretty well. They are able to deliver what you require in the same way that Cisco does, but the price is going to be a little bit affordable for the company.

In my company, we don't have any plans of buying anything related to SD-WAN, but, in terms of personal growth, I'm planning to get more information and more knowledge about SD-WAN. There are a couple of courses that I could learn from.

I would rate Cisco SD-WAN a six out of ten. It is a good solution with SD-WAN, but it is not the best. 

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. the primary use case is interconnecting offices.

The main functionality includes a secure firewall, cloud access security broker (CASB), and zero-trust configuration.

It is very simple and easy to manage, compared to other methods.

They should enhance the reporting because, as it is today, they need more executive-level reports.

If in the future they can support Cisco SASE then it would be good.

We have been using Cisco SD-WAN for the past years.

As of now, the stability is fine.

We have not tested the scalability because the volume of traffic is not very high for us. We didn't have to look at it.

My team has been in contact with technical support, but I have not personally had experience with them.

Prior to Cisco SD-WAN, we were using a manual configuration. We used to achieve the same functionality; however, in order to make it simple and easy to manage, we switched to this solution.

I have not worked with other similar products and have no experience with them.

The initial setup is straightforward, and not complex.

It took us almost two months to deploy because we were connecting with a few offices outside of the country. We had to send the equipment to those countries, which was time-consuming.

Our clients have made decisions related to pricing, but we are not involved at this stage.

With respect to security, we did not use the functionality because we were mainly using it to interconnect offices. Security was not a big concern for us. Had there been a requirement for direct connectivity to the internet or accessing the public cloud, then security might have been needed. We were establishing IPsec VPN, which accomplished this task.

This is a product that I can recommend. I am satisfied with it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.