Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

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.

We use Cisco SD-WAN for a VPN, and we create the DNS in Fortinet. We have used this solution for data centers and failover tests for disaster recovery.

It is really easy to deploy and use. It is also easy to use for failovers and designing solutions.  

The rollout is really quick. It is easy to adjust and roll out.

I have been using Cisco SD-WAN for five or six years.

It is as stable as your lines are. We mostly have fiber connections, and it is really stable and performing well. I once had a problem with a power unit, but I have never experienced any downtime.

We have contacted them. All engineers were experienced enough to support us. We had a special team from Cisco.

The initial setup was straightforward. The design takes longer than the implementation. You have to know your layer 3, but it can also define layer 2 or layer 1. It is really a great tool. 

I used a consultant for the implementation. I am an architect, and I only design the solution. I discuss the solution with the network engineer and then roll it out with the help of the network engineer and the project manager.

It is much cheaper than other solutions. Most of our clients are the top 500 companies, and they all have a corporate contract.

I would recommend this solution. It is a great solution, and it is already defined. It is more suitable for medium and large enterprises operating in lots of regions and countries. For smaller organizations, you can use a normal business DSL solution. 

I would advise doing a VR test to make sure that all settings are correct. We have had issues where the configuration or IP spoofing on the network was not so good. You also need to know the number of tenants that you need. You can set it up on paper, but if you don't test it, you would never know that it is working. 

I would rate Cisco SD-WAN a nine out of ten. It is the best solution that I ever had, but there might be something better than this in the future.

We are a service provider and we plan to provide a managed service to our customers using this product.

The most valuable feature is the ease of central management. That is the main thing for us.

The licensing model needs to be improved.

Sometimes we feel that the choice of models is very limited, so we would like to see additional devices made available.

We have been evaluating Cisco SD-WAN for the past two months.

We have not experienced any issues with stability over the past two months.

We have about 16 users. Because we are just evaluating, we don't have a forecast at this point.

We contacted support because we needed some initial awareness about configuration-related issues.

The initial setup is very difficult. We did not find it easy because we hardly have any experience. This is just the first one that we are setting up.

The costs are a bit on the high side.

We are currently conducting a PoC. We did evaluate two solutions, and Cisco was the one chosen for the proof of concept.

Although we are still in the initial stages, I feel that this is a product that I can recommend. In general, we are satisfied with it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have deployed Cisco Meraki devices at 107 locations to connect with the cloud for centralized management. We are using MX68, MS120, and MR33.

We are currently also considering Cisco Meraki for another project for implementation at 28 locations. We have a team of three members looking into different solutions and vendors. We're looking into the firewall, SD-WAN, and email certificate.

The centralized management is the most important feature. We can monitor what is going on at every location in our network through just one center.

I would like them to add some more SD-WAN ports. We have seen one implementation where there were four ISPs. Currently, we have a maximum of two ports for ISP in this device. Therefore, we cannot connect directly, and we need other switches. There should be some option to have more than two ports for SD-WAN. 

I have been using this solution for seven to eight months.

I have faced issues with one or two boxes. We replaced those boxes.

Cisco provides the best support among all the vendors. It's the best in terms of technical support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. For one location, it would take around two days: one day for the configuration and connecting to the cloud and one day to go to the client location and deploy it.

Cisco Meraki dashboard is very good. It's simple, and you can enable and implement everything using this dashboard. Cisco Meraki is for large enterprises.

I recommend Cisco Meraki to all my clients who have different locations and want to have a centralized location. Every architecture is moving towards the cloud. Centralized management makes accessibility easier for one person. We can know what is going on at a location and what is going into the devices. Whatever configuration changes are required, we can do them from one place. We don't have to go to the client's location. We also don't have to log in to different devices to do configuration or something like that. We can do it from one centralized management.

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

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

One of our customers has approximately 100 branches that were linked together using Cisco SD-WAN in multiple phases. In the first phase, they started with 40 branches. In the head office, they have two MPLS links and two internet links. In each branch, they have one of each. Before implementing this solution, they could not do both things at the same time.

With Cisco, you can optimize and design the solution in the way you want. For example, you can have 1,000 branches with three or four data centers, and if you can reroute the traffic from one branch to the nearest data center in order to inspect the traffic.

The most valuable feature is the application-level routing. One of our clients used this solution to route VOIP and video calls using MPLS.

The single dashboard makes the management very easy.

This solution has a built-in firewall that handles URL filtering and functionality, but you have to buy other cisco services like, Umbrella. Some of the customers would rather just use Fortinet or Palo Alto. This solution should include a fully functional firewall at no extra charge. At this time it supports layers three, four, and five, but it needs support for a level seven firewall.

Cisco SD-WAN is stable. There might be minor bugs in a few of the features, but overall, the product is stable and the customers are happy with it.

This solution is highly scalable. We have heard that you can have 10,000 or 20,000 servers.

Our clients are medium-scale customers, as opposed to really large enterprises. They are retail stores, organizations in the hospitality industry, and pharmaceutical companies.

We have also worked with Meraki SD-WAN, but the choice of solution depends on the customer's size and requirements. Meraki is for smaller clients. For example, Meraki only supports two landings, whereas Cisco supports more than that.

The initial setup is not that easy, although there is training that is available for it. It will take time to create templates and the other configuration that needs to be done.

it will take between five and ten days to complete the basic, initial setup, which includes changing the IP addresses. After that, you can migrate two or three branches a day if you have the devices.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to consider the size of the environment. If they have 100 to 150 branches, then they should also look into other solutions such as VeloCloud by VMware.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Full replacement of office to office, office to data center, and data center to data center MPLS and private lines with commodity Internet and SD-WAN.

80% reduction in WAN costs.

New sites can be onboarded in hours or days versus many months with carrier based technology. 

The most useful feature for our organization is the combination of on-prem and cloud-based deployments. We connect securely to our hybrid cloud using transit VPCs and cloud on-ramp for fast deployments. We have recently started using deep packet inspection allowing the use of the transit path as the firewall instead of putting firewalls on both ends of the mesh.

The inexpensive Viptela hardware may be replaced with overpriced Cisco routers. This would be a tragic mistake for Cisco as the lightweight commodity platform built by Viptela is the reason to own this solution. 

Since it was Viptela in 2017.

It is extremely stable. You can set it and forget it, if that is your thing. There are a lot of improvements with each full version release. As with all things Cisco, if you have the chance to wait for a few months before deploying the latest release, do it. They can be buggy for the first few months. 

It is very scalable. We have it deployed to 23 countries, AWS, Azure, and our data centers. 

MPLS, P2P lines and multi-point VPN mesh. These were either too expensive or required too much operational overhead. 

The team at Viptela,and subsequently at Cisco, were extremely engaged and ready to help ensure we had a successful deployment. The concept of an overlay and underlay can be intimidating if you are used to conventional networks, but you will get used to it. 

We deployed it ourselves with our own network engineers. 

80 percent reduction in WAN costs. There are no MPLS or P2P circuits left in the organization. 

Cisco, Citrix, and Fortinet.

Map out all of the applications that use your WAN today. If you have assets like physical phone systems or dedicated VPN devices that are not ready to be off-the-books, start the project anyway. As contacts and hardware become end of life, onboard those sites. You will have a full mesh in no time. If you wait for all of your existing technology to be end of life, you are missing the point.

Our primary use case is for the web gateway and VPN server and for access list control. We basically use the solution as a minimal requirement for the network gateway. We have about 50 users. I work as a network analyst and we're vendors, not a direct partner of Cisco. 

The regular net routing is a good feature. It's not just good for routing although like a lot of things it isn't linked to anything else.

On its own the product does what it's expected to do but if you're looking for more features you'd need to move to a dedicated firewall like the ISA firewall. There's something a little inconvenient and old style about it. 

The solution could have a better web interface to simplify changing configurations or see some statistics. I think the main weakness of the Cisco product is the user interface, I'd like to see things more clearly. 

I've been using the solution for five or six years. 

The stability of the solution is one of the better features. 

Scalability is somewhat limited, especially from the technical side. It's just a gateway with some routing and we don't use any dynamic routing. There's nothing fancy and the scalability is enough for our needs. 

Cisco is always good with technical support, it's easy and the contact is fast when you really need it. 

Initial setup is a little difficult but more or less straightforward. We have an older version which is not as flexible. 

It took us one day to implement and we didn't use any advanced features so it was quite quick. We migrated the set-up from the old device and put it on the new one. They're both on the same platform. We did the implementation ourselves and we have one staff member involved with maintenance. We're currently looking to switch our internet gateway so I'm not sure how long this situation will last. We're looking for a provider so we can outsource the network. 

There's not much advice I can give other than to suggest that people get familiar with using the command line.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10 because it has good reliability. We've rarely had any problems with it.  

We use this solution for our web gateway, VPN, and access control.

It is good enough to provide normal web access but it doesn't offer any add-ons. We plan to move away from this solution and use the cloud-based firewall that is managed by our provider.

The most valuable feature is the network routing.

The reliability is high and we have only had to restart it once or twice over the years.

I would like to see a better, web-based interface to make changes to the configuration or to view statistics. The main weakness of Cisco products is the user interface.

This solution would be improved with the inclusion of an ISA Firewall.

I have been using this solution for five or six years.

This is a stable solution. it does what it is supposed to do and is working fine.

I would say that the scalability is pretty limited, although we don't have any issue with it because we only use the basic features. For example, we don't use dynamic routing. We have 50 users.

The Cisco technical support is pretty good. They are easy to contact if you need support and they are pretty fast.

The initial setup is pretty bit straightforward, although it is a little bit hard because it is done through the command line. The web GUI is an old style and not really flexible.

It took us approximately one day to switch from our old solution. We don't use any of the advanced features so it was a simple migration for us.

Our in-house team implemented this solution.

One person is suitable for deployment and maintenance.

We pay for the Cisco Customer Care support, which is a couple of hundred dollars. There are no fees in addition to this.

This solution is only good for basic routing. I cannot map stuff to a network name because it is not linked to anything else. It is a standalone unit.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to familiarize themselves with the command line.

To summarize, the reliability is very high but managing it is a little bit inconvenient.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.