VMware SD-WAN Reviews

We are installing edge to support the service providers' enterprise customers. There's a standard hardware edge.

I like that I can combine some different internet connections and resources. For example, MPLS VPN, internet, and 4G. You can combine it all together. Before, we could only use an MPLS VPN only.

The initial setup is very easy.

It is stable. The solution is reliable. 

It's scalable. 

Technical support has been very helpful. 

The product has a very good user dashboard that is simple to navigate.

I'd like them to improve their mobile parts. I want them to get faster in this field.

The cost is a little bit high. We'd like it if it was less expensive. 

We'd like to see more security added to the solution. It would be good if it had firewall functionality.

I've been using the solution for one year. 

This is a stable product. the performance is good and it is reliable. There aren't any bugs or glitches that I have seen and it does not crash or freeze. 

The solution scales well. It's simple to expand. 

Technical support has a lot of expertise. They are knowledgeable and responsive. 

Positive

We found the setup to be straightforward and simple. It is not overly complex. 

I'd rate the ease of setup a five out of five.

It's competitive, yet it's a little bit more expensive than other brands.

We pay about $500 USD, or 700,000 Korean won.

I'd rate it a two or three out of five in terms of affordability.

Compared to Fortinet or Cisco, VMware is quite easy to set up, and the management dashboard is intuitive. 

We are a reseller and distributor. 

I would give the solution a rating of eight out of ten.

Our only use cases are large multinational enterprise customers, as well as very large service providers. The solutions get deployed to the public cloud or to the private cloud depending on the user's requirements.

There are 400 functionalities of the system. Depending on the user's requirements, we may find one feature more important than the other.

Sometimes the room for improvement is designing it for a different customer base that they're not currently in. We match the right solution to the right user's requirements. Some users need a multitenant offering, whereas most large enterprises don't need that. But if you are talking to a service provider, some don't offer a multitenant solution. And so when the customer needs that, we would say use one with a multitenant, like VMware.

We have been using this solution for about two or three years.

The ones we work with are all very good.

The scalability of the solution is very good. We have plans to increase usage.

Some clients want to go very slowly and test out just one country first. If you're going into a lot of countries, you sometimes have regulatory problems with devices being imported and finding the right people to handle that.

I can't really comment because I haven't used it that much.

The initial setup is always pretty complex with what we're involved in.

The deployment time really depends on how conservative a customer is and how quickly they want it to go. Some of them are three months and some are a year.

The amount of staff we need for the deployment depends on whether you're deploying to 50 sites or 2,500 sites. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. In order for it to be a ten out of ten, there should be more automation and self-service features.

One of the key use cases for VMware SD-WAN was assisting a customer in the industrial zone. They required virtualized servers and wanted to enable VMware SD-WAN to connect their sites in Japan or China. We assisted in building the system by integrating VMware servers and utilizing the Cisco suite.

VMware SD-WAN is harder than Cisco. It is complex, and we must take many steps to get the service. I think it would be beneficial if obtaining licenses could be simplified. Currently, numerous options and integrations are bundled together, which can make it quite complex.

The tool is stable. 

The product is scalable. We have three to four customers working with it. 

My assessment of the tech support for VMware is that it's generally accessible and valuable. However, there are some limitations. We typically contact them through a contracted third-party provider, often located outside of our region, such as in Singapore. While they are responsive, there are occasions when they may not immediately identify the issue and need to escalate it to a higher support tier, which can take some time.

We initiated the process by installing the software and configuring Windows on the VMware SD-WAN platform.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten. The advice I would give to others who are considering starting to use VMware SD-WAN is to assess their organization's technical expertise and requirements first. However, if they lack the knowledge or resources, it might be better to opt for a simpler solution or to seek external support.

The tool's value and impact are significant, particularly for larger enterprises. It allows for configuration. However, the benefits may not be as pronounced for smaller offices or enterprises.

The biggest benefit to SD-WAN is with VoIP. Any real-time data transfer where you cannot have any latency and packet delivery.

What VeloCloud provides is a solution that maintains data integrity. 

The biggest challenge for voice over IP telephone systems, are real-time and also video, and any kind of video conferencing. 

That type of thing, if there are any latencies, you're going to get trashy voice calls and also a lot of intermittent ghosting on conference calls. That's where VeloCloud comes in. They provide a resilient connectivity points system. 

Your connectivity is pretty much preserved.

A lot of companies are moving over to VoIP because they're cheaper. It's a cheaper telephony system than regular phone PBX systems. So, any major company is moving towards a hosted or internal VoIP solution. Again, the biggest challenge is point-to-point latency.

The biggest feature is called D.M.P.O., or Dynamic Multipath Optimization, which is one of the technologies that they use to deliver or ensure data integrity.

One of the things they've done is they've made it user-friendly. If you're a multi-national company and you've got company in France, England, United States, and also in the Southern hemisphere like Australia, and you've got a manufacturing plant, you can see how your plants are performing. You can see the kind of connectivity, as well as the resiliency between each manufacturing plant.

You know whether your internet provider is performing to their service level agreements.

The challenge right now is the customers understanding that it's a subscription-based service. The price is a sticker shock to clients because most clients are used to buying a product and not a subscription service. 

What VeloCloud requires is a combination of a subscription service, which is the cloud orchestration, and the devices, which can be purchased independently. Clients think that they can just buy the product for their endpoint usage and that's it. But, they don't realize they've got to pay for a monthly subscription because the technology that ties the two edge devices together is up in the cloud and you need to have that. That intelligence, you have to pay for monthly. 

It helps to understand this when people are using Microsoft 365, a subscription-based service. People except the fact that, oh if I need Word or Excel, I can buy it from Microsoft for a monthly subscription rate.

Services similar to that are now more and more being accepted. Whereas back a year ago, people were saying, "No, I just want to buy a hardware device." That's where the Cisco Meraki comes in. They don't really have much of a cloud orchestration solution. They have devices that provide SD-WAN solutions. You're dependent on each device to do their functionality, whereas VeloCloud puts it into the cloud.

It's not like you buy a router, install it, and you're good to go. It's the service, and what they call orchestration of maintaining data integrity, delivering point-to-point. 

If you're in China and you're trying to ascend data across the United States or whatever country you're in, you can imagine the path that it's going through from any world destination from the US. There's going to be thousands and thousands of hops, and by the time you get to your endpoint, any of those hops can introduce some sort of problem. High latency. 

With the SD-WAN solution, it determines the optimal path because they have gateways that help reduce the number of hops. If you didn't use VeloCloud and you wanted to set up a telephone call using VoIP from the United States, here in California, to China or wherever, your chances of having good, solid connectivity is going to be slim because you've got no protection. Whereas the SD-WAN VeloCloud solution provides number one, reducing the linkage between the two points and then it also provides some resiliency and ability to recover from data packet losses.

Depending on the clients and how critical the data is for them, it will determine how expensive the solution is. If you are a real estate office and you have ten offices, it may be too pricey for that type of industry, but if you're a manufacturer or a software developer, or a company that makes games, and you provide the gaming service, then the cost of the solution is not going to be a major concern.

If you are in the medical industry and you need to keep your hospitals connected and especially with COVID 19 and sharing of data, then the cost is not the biggest issue. It's really delivering resilient service.

They need to increase their gateways. When I staring with this solution, they only had 600 to 700. I say only, but that's a lot still, but they're now over 1000 gateways. It's like Elon Musk's new satellite service. Their Starlink. It's the same with Gateway. 

For Elon Musk to have to launch 2,400 satellites, and in order to provide satellite internet services and to provide just enough, when they're touting one to two-gigabit transfer rates, in order to do that, where it's ubiquitous, it doesn't matter whether you're out to sea or whether you're in the office, or you're by the shoreline in California, you have access to the internet.  

It performance is mediocre but as more and more satellites are added, the performance and the capabilities are that much more.

They need more gateways. It comes down to access; if for example, you have a gateway in LA, it probably covers San Diego and parts of Sacramento, but if you have two gateways it will cover more traffic that is in that area. The more gateways you have the more connectivity access for clients to use to get to the cloud.

Because of the buyout, it has to integrate with VMware's distribution channels, with their support channels. They have to basically GRAT the development of their solution, and fit right inside with VMware's. It's like Dell buying a small company, and then that small company needs to conform to Dell practices. Right now there, they're in flux.

Right now I have to manually manage the SD-WAN dashboard for the connectivity to the internet and routing from point-to-point.

The routing from point-to-point and all of that stuff are separate from the internal local area network. So, right now, software-defined WAN and software-defined LAN are two separate controlling systems. If they can integrate that, such that they are on one dashboard, I can see what's going on with my China manufacturing plant from the US and I can see from the China plant what devices are failing from the US then that would make it even better. So far, it's certainly a step in the right direction, but there's of course, like in time there's going to be continued improvements.

It provides a solution that all companies need and that's connectivity, resiliency.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I've been involved with VeloCloud for over a year.

They recently were purchased by VMware.

If I were to stand up a cloud service like Microsoft Office 365, I'm going to install it into a data center that can provide service anywhere in the world. I would have a server that's providing this service.

You can't put all your eggs in one installation location, you're going to have the same technology repeated in multiple data centers around the world. To provide that one service, you're going to have that service, and Office 365 virtualized so that you can run it up in Seattle and Redmond. Then you can add, you can run the same service in China, in Australia, and in the Southern hemisphere. All running the same software service so that if one drops out the other one picks up.

The resiliency is there for cloud-based services. That's why everything has gone cloud. Everybody's doing virtualization.

You can scale it such that, okay. You know, China's growing, they need their own data center that covers that whole market, maybe you need two or three and then you're done. Because virtualization is basically copying your server. You just take an image of your server's operating system and you just reinstall it on another server and you've got the same services on a different server.

Our client size varies from small to large enterprise companies.

It varies, but it can scale. The thing can provide scalability and I can solve a multinational company without actually having to fly to every location. I can just say, Hey, VMware VeloCloud, if you want resiliency, you want to connect your companies. We have Chinese manufacturing, food manufacturing companies in LA, Texas. They've got 13 locations and they're complaining about their phone services. The phone just keeps dropping out on them. I always said, well, you need a VeloCloud SD-WAN. So, it's now rolling it all out.

I deal primarily with the IT staff and obviously, it's helping them with the technology to sell the upper management with it.

Technical support is really good, they are there to help out.

I would rate technical support an eight out of ten.

SD-WAN has been out for the last nine or ten years, but it really hasn't grabbed on until the last five years. As an IT engineer, I had to come up with my own solutions, such that if I'm standing up a data center and I've got 10 to 15 switches, and each of those switches needs to be managed and controlled, each one of those switches has its own management console, so I'm managing 10 different management consoles. Whereas with SD-WAN and SD-LAN, you have a central controller that manages multiple devices, you have software to find networking, a controller that controls multiple switches, multiple routers, that type of thing. So that's where SD software-defined networking has advanced the way you manage networking. You're not overloaded with having to deal with each individual device or appliance. You buy devices that conform to SD-WAN technology or SD-LAN technology, and SD-LAN by Ubiquity is the one I use there.

All of my switches, my routers, my access points, my cameras, security cameras, all of that is being handled by one software that manages them all. I can see at a glance, all of my devices, make modifications, see what's failing, see what needs to be replaced in the one in one software monitoring system.

They have what they call a zero-touch setup. 

I can pre-configure the edge devices that get installed at the client site, and rather than me going in and installing it, I can pre-program it and set it up to where I can shift the unit to their IT person, and they can plug it into their network and they're up and running and have connectivity.

It's an SD-WAN solution and they've got edge devices of different sources and types. Depending on the client's needs, you pretty much choose the type of product that's required. The end result is cloud-based. It's a cloud-based software-defined wide area networking affiliation.

VeloCloud is in the cloud. They have over a thousand gateways to get to their services in the cloud. 

They're tied into Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and also AWS services. If you're going to do a cloud design, what you likely want to do is have an SD-WAN solution like VeloCloud, such that if you're dealing with multiple people or multiple businesses with multiple locations, what you'll do is utilize their cloud-based solutions and edge devices to connect to clients' network nodes. There are different offices and provide resilient connectivity.

They have to understand the solution. A lot of IT technologists don't have a full grasp of the software-defined networking SD-WAN, SD-LAN.

Until technologists understand that, businesses won't understand because the businesses rely on their IT staff to stay in touch with the latest and greatest technologies that can save the operational costs.

We haven't reached the crest of the wave yet for all of us, even VeloCloud. They're just not quite at the crest yet, but soon everybody will understand. Oh, I know what SD-WAN is, I know it's going to save me money. I know it's going to allow me to reduce my IT staff because they're not having to be encumbered by the way the legacy management solutions were back then. That's all dashboard monitorization.

I would rate VeloCloud a nine out of ten.

The use case is mainly just communication between the branch offices or the branches. That's pretty much it, the communication between the branches.

Also, currently, we're doing what we call a PCI segmentation as well. 

It's stable most of the time. It's reliable I would say. We have rarely or never disconnected unless there's a power issue or power outage. Even then, we have a disconnection from one of the branches. Beyond that we don't have a lot of issues. It's very minimum disruption. That's what I like about it.

It's very easy to work with the solution. We understand it well. Customer service is very good. 

When we upgrade to one of the edges, it goes very smoothly. 

We're trying to integrate it with our Prisma Access architecture in the future. We would just like to see it smoothly deployed. We are going now back and forth between our Palo Alto reps and VeloCloud or VMware SD-WAN reps to find a solution to integrate both into one solution. I'm not sure if this is on Palo Alto's or Prisma's or VMware's side.  Other than that, all the features and everything look great.

The only thing that I'm having issues with is on one of the sites, I can't see the location on the map. That's the only thing that can be fixed.

I've used the solution for the last eight months only. I've been with the company only that long, however, they had this for probably a couple of years, I would say.

It's stable. We've had it for a period of time now and it's very reliable. All of them have issues and most of the time, they're not even related to the solution itself. The solution really does run well.

It's very scalable. One of the edges we have supports 2,000 tunnels and their edge is very scalable. It depends on the model you use. On even some of these small sites, we rely on them for Wi-Fi in our small sites it's been great overall.

We likely have 1,000 users on the solution. 

We have plans to increase usage since we're looking to migrate from a physical data center to Prisma Access on the cloud. Then we have to involve something called the VeloCloud Gateway, which is VMware.

They are our cloud gateways, so those have to be involved in our new architecture or design. We're increasing everything and the only thing that would be decreasing would be where we're closing some offices and that's just the nature of business itself. However, we're still opening others in other states.

Customer service is great. They've been very responsive. One time we had to replace one or two of the edges in one of our main offices in the Houston, Texas area and they send a technician and everything went smoothly on that end.

The technical support is knowledgeable. Customer support is a partner with VMware, so when we ask for support or technical support, and it's always there and they're always helpful.

Positive

I wasn't part of that actual step.

You do not need much maintenance. The last time when I did one site it was only me and then probably a couple of people from our end.

We likely had assistance from the reseller. That's who we deal with when we have any issues with our VMware SD-WAN.

I don't have any insights into any ROI. 

I'm not aware of the licensing aspect of the solution. It might be somewhere in the middle of the market. It's likely not the least expensive not the most. 

Support may be an extra add-on cost as well. 

We are using the VeloCloud version or model.

On each site, on each branch, we have edges of either one or two for redundancies and that's how they communicate. There's an overlay and that's how they communicate between branches so we have on-prem edges, yes. We have one on AW as well, however, the most we use for now is between branches in Texas.

I would recommend people use this product. We've been using it and we don't have any issues. Honestly, we don't want to get away from this solution at all. I recommend using the solution as it's very reliable, convenient, and easy when you communicate with it. Supporting it and then looking into issues and trying to implement rules and best policies is pretty straightforward. Even if not, we always work with their reseller and they always help us.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for connecting multiple sites through the internet.

Typically, our clients are medium-sized businesses.

VeloCloud developed DMPO to increase performance and connectivity.

VeloCloud provides very good performance, support, portal configuration, and service integration — I think that it's perfect.

VeloCloud could improve its integration capabilities with other solutions. VeloCloud just provides connectivity, but what about advanced security services or administration service providers, and HPP for voice solutions? I think that VeloCloud could improve this kind of service integration. I know it's not their main use case, but it's part of their portfolio.

In the next release, I would like to see better support for IPv6.

I also think that a CPE that supports WiFi 6 is necessary.

I am a reseller — I have been using this solution for three years.

The stability is good, but it could be better.

Scalability-wise, I think it's pretty good. It can support various numbers of CPEs and VMs for different uses in order to grow the capacity of the platform.

Our customers don't have any complaints surrounding technical support. They don't often need help as there is plenty of reliable documentation online surrounding VeloCloud. We have yet to come across a use case that VeloCloud doesn't have documentation for.

The initial setup is very simple. You can auto-connect the CPEs. Once you activate the CPEs, the CPEs can then connect to other CPEs that are in the network.

For reliable connectivity, I would definitely recommend VeloCloud; however, if my customers want another kind of service in addition to connectivity, then I would recommend another kind of solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

We use VMware SD-WAN on the cloud and we use our own cloud.

The solution is used by our customers for putting their IT infrastructure in the Cloud and bridge to connect for retail. We have a very big string of customers moving their workplaces into the Cloud. This calls for a new topology and this is where VMware SD-WAN is the best fit.

There is one feature that would set VMware SD-WAN apart from others solutions, and that is what I call inter-cloud connectivity. All the solutions regarding VMware are good because for example, If I go from my workplace to a retail office and I want to use my applications in the Cloud, that is possible. Perhaps we have customers who have their IT partial environments hosted in different cloud locations, such as Amazon and Azure, and the interconnection between the clouds, this is not possible. If it was possible it would be a market game-changer. Having the SD-WAN solution that is good at optimizing and facilitating traffic between different cloud providers would be great.

I have been using VMware SD-WAN for more than one year.

The stability of VMware SD-WAN is very good.

VMware SD-WAN is scalable.

The initial setup is very simple.

The licensing model of VMware SD-WAN could be improved, it is not always that competitive. The biggest concern is to be competitive against other solutions. However, the way that the licensing model is designed is not corresponding to the real use cases of my customers.

My advice to others would be to trust the solution and buy it.

I rate VMware SD-WAN an eight out of ten

I have found the optimization feature that acts to ensure the quality of the services running on the overlay to be most valuable.

VMware SD-WAN is a more complete product because of the SD-WAN feature.

The firewall can be more advanced.

The 4G connection doesn't come by default, and it would be good to have that in the next release.

The flexibility of use for customers could be improved as well. It would be good to also improve the reseller transfer of the box from one customer to another customer.

The cost could be lower too.

I have been using VMware SD-WAN for about 2 to 3 years.

The technical support is okay for Singapore. VMware has had quite good results this year.

To register with the orchestrator takes some effort sometimes. Our engineer did try a few times, and it's not exactly zero-touch. You still need to have all the information.

The cost of VMware SD-WAN is high, but I think you can still get better pricing if your volume is high.

If you are purely looking at it from a connectivity point of view and not so much from the point of security, then you can go for VMware. However, if you also want security features and you have a tight budget, then you probably need to choose Fortinet because Fortinet itself is a firewall. For VMware, you have to either get the NFV model that supports a third party firewall (it's a virtual appliance) or subscribe to additional services from cloud-based firewall vendors. So, you will have additional costs.

Although Fortinet is lower cost-wise than VMware, in terms of the SD-WAN feature, I think VMware is more complete. Fortinet is still lagging on the orchestrator function. So, I would rate VMware SD-WAN at eight on a scale from one to ten.