VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN Reviews

Our main use cases have been for customers who have been traditionally using MPLS lines and are now moving into a lot more SaaS-based applications to transform the WAN infrastructure. A lot of our customers have end-of-life, end-of-support devices on the WAN and they are always looking for doing RFPs on cutting edge technology. Some of them happen to use a lot of VMware and Cisco portfolios in their data centers and they are constantly trying to see what solution fits best for them.

VMware has been chosen by many of our customers who do not want to do a lot of complex routing in their environment and want a very easy-to-use solution. The most valuable features are simple troubleshooting, Dynamic Multipath Optimization (DMPO), and cybersecurity. 

DMPO is a technology that is similar to a proprietary technology that VMware has. Customers probably do not understand too much about it in detail but they know about the benefits of it in general. What it does is constantly monitors all different areas, such as latency, jitter bandwidth, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. It makes sure that if there is a case where there is a networking jitter contained in the link, it figures out how to maneuver your traffic elsewhere. This is all done automatically without customers getting slowed down on those poor links. The customers do not want to spend too much time researching these complex technologies which VMware automatically takes care of them. It benefits many IT teams by taking a lot of the burden away who are constantly juggling a hundred different other things as well.

The cybersecurity component is very important. VMware also has a lot of security components embedded into the SD-WAN, especially with the traditionally SD-WAN, and now a lot more integration through secure access with partnerships companies, such as Zscaler and other SaaS-based solutions. VMware has a lot of portfolios within themselves that can support many security use cases and if they cannot they have partnerships with industry leaders who can. For example, the Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions through the Zscaler partnerships can help customers who want to move from traditional VPN solutions towards ZTNA based ones.

Overall as an experience, I have found that customers like the UI/UX experience that they receive from VMware.

There are customers that have very large routing and segmentation operations who do a lot of segmentation within their network and have complex routing requirements. VMware does not provide the facilities in terms of doing a lot of operations with routing tables, such as complex routing policies. It is more about that out-of-pocket experience that customers get out of VMware. There are other technologies for this type of use case from solutions, such as Versa or other WANs. These are for customers who are wanting to maneuver or configure things themselves, similar to DIY solutions, for them going to technologies, for instance from Versa, makes much more sense because they can do a lot more with routing, complex segmentation, and complex configurations. For customers who have complex service provider requirements, VMware and other solutions cannot support a lot of those use cases.

In an upcoming release, they should allow customers the flexibility to use mobile applications where they can go and check on the information about their networks. A lot of vendors, such as Meraki, have a lot more integration with the use of portals to a mobile application. Having this feature as an alternative to logging into a laptop would be beneficial. If you are a SaaS-based company why not make a mobile application as well. You might not be able to do configurations but at least monitor while away or on vacation.

I have been using this solution for approximately four years.

The software itself is very stable which our customers really like. They do not want to have buggy software or problems. I see the customers choose VMware over others and over time because of positive experiences with use cases, it becomes a trusted vendor and they tend to trust in the name as a brand in the future.

IT vendors are getting much more stable with the code, but nowadays everybody has more attention towards SaaS technology. Networking will just become another bundle to a lot of those providing this type of solution. Many vendors are getting into SaaS solutions and in terms of documentation, code releases, and features, there are probably more advancements. In SD-WAN specifically, a lot more features are moving into SaaS-based solutions. These new solutions are going to get reviewed and push the industries even further towards SaaS solutions it is the future.

The technical support is good.

The solution is straightforward to install compared to other solutions, VMware makes setup simple. SD-WAN vendors have a kind of simplicity embedded into them, just because of the nature of the software-defined components into it. 

I have evaluated Zscaler and Versa.

The advice to others wanting to implement this solution is not to try and do everything yourself. A lot of customers choose this route and are negatively affected two years later. It is important to do a lot of proof of concepts and testing. Get the solution from a trusted service provider who can manage it for you because these technologies are really complex under the code. Having a trusted service provider who can work with you and can have a lot of benefits. If your company business is not running the WAN links, I would suggest just offload that burden to a trusted service provider because then you can focus on your business. Technologies are complex, and doing all of these operations through your own IP node is complex. A trusted service provider who knows what they are doing can offload a lot of that burden allowing for you to relax and actually focus on your main applications and business.

A lot of customers I have seen in the industry try to do all the operations themselves just because they think that it is good to insource everything. This is one of the areas that you should not be insourceed a hundred percent of your team because these technologies can be extremely difficult to do on a day-to-day basis. Service providers handle hundreds of customers and they know a lot more about what you are doing and can be very useful than if you did it by yourself.

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.

There is a cloud gateway feature that centrally locates every space, which you don't get with Cisco. The cloud gateway is a very good feature for scaling purposes, etc. It's a very simple feature. In fact, everything about VeloCloud is quite simple, including the concept of the circuits, and, from a  technical perspective, it's not as challenging as Cisco VPNs. They have VPN 0, VPN 1, VPN 2, VPN 3, but they're very simple in that approach — the concept of circuits. Overall, I think both products are good. 

Cisco has begun to push its SD-WAN code within all of its ISR routers. This has made deployment quite challenging. With VeloCloud, deployment is much easier because they include all of their own hardware.

Cloud-based, it's okay because they roll up the device and provide you with a link for access. In regards to in-house, when you want to deploy the orchestrator, it becomes very difficult. Currently, I don't see any such good documentation compared to their competitors, like Cisco, etc.

Also, If you look at Cisco, just Google it and you'll get every detail: what to do, what specific system, what server, how much RAM, how much storage, all the details — it's just much easier.

If a customer has an optimization solution within their network, then you have to be very careful when designing — optimization and all. This can make your design very complex. If the customer has an existing optimization solution, then you have to be very careful when designing any part of the SD-WAN solution — Cisco or Velo.

They should provide us with the flexibility to scale up.

I have been using this solution for two and a half to three years.

VeloCloud is very stable — it's a very good solution.

I have not done a scale with something like 6,000 to 7,000 sites; however, if you look at the pure design, phase-wise, then you have to be very particular about new designs. Velo is purely based on design. I don't think the SD-WAN is that new and scaling that amount of sites requires a simple design rather than a complex solution.

With Cisco, we were working on a huge scale — I think it was around 1700 sites for that customer. After 900 sites, it started having problems. The controller was not sending the new site updates to the hub and it was not reflecting in the routing table; however, in the end, it scaled, but there were some challenges that we had to overcome.

There are not enough people within their support team. I would give them a rating of three out of five.

They have to improve, they have to be quicker and understand the types of problems customers face. 

The initial setup is straightforward. The initial setup is very simple compared to Cisco. Cisco claims to be Zero Touch Provisioning, but I think they have a lot of complexity surrounding that Zero Touch. With VeloCloud, you can generate and send emails, and the receiver just has to connect to the device, open up the email and the configuration improves. In this way, I think Velo is good with Zero Touch Provisioning.

Deployment time really depends on what you deploy. If you want to roll out a small site on a single device, then the designing and the policies are all done — it's a really quick job. Your circuit and site will rollout quickly, everything will be up and running roughly within two to two and a half hours. If you're looking at a complex site, then of course, the complexity increases.

VeloCloud is a good solution. They are only lacking in regards to the in-house version. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VeloCloud a rating of seven.

I work for a supply chain and we have a site where we want to offload the internet traffic and get to the application, etc. Some of the cloud applications go out directly and automatically through the SD-WAN device to the internet, so it is local and does not go to the MPLS. We can load balance those applications.

Their QOE, or Quality Of Experience, is the most valuable feature. Basically, VeloCloud measures the latency and the chatter and everything on a voice application, and it just routes the traffic or duplicates the packets according to that chatter. 

They have a lot of built-ins. There are so many applications defined inside the solution. It makes it so that we don't have to create some policies. Each and every application is already defined in it.

The solution doesn't offer failover between their own devices. If I want to, I should be able to put the two devices together, so there can be a failover. 

They need to come out with a new device, such as a 510 LTE which would have LTE capabilities.

On the 610 devices, they're saying they're going to have LTE in it. They don't have it. They don't even have a POE feature inside the VeloCloud devices. Therefore, if I want to set up a POE, just the one device with everything in it, I actually don't have a POE support on it.

I've been using the solution for about six months now.

Stability-wise the solution is quite good. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy at all.

The scalability is giving us problems at the moment. We want to put this as, for example, a primary MPLS, with internet secondary, and cellular tertiary. The LTE device doesn't even failover between them, however. Therefore, there is no scalability there.

We don't deal with technical support, due to the fact that we have AT&T. Since we deal with AT&T, we don't deal with them directly. Therefore, I can't speak to their level of knowledge or responsiveness.

Our company is actually many companies. At another subsidiary, they are doing a POC with Cisco. Cisco is providing them with better pricing. On top of that, they have good availability and failover capabilities on LTE. The Cisco router can do the secondary subnet on the same VLAN, which VeloCloud cannot do.

They have a lot of features we technically need to have but don't on VeloCloud.

The initial setup isn't too complex. It's pretty straightforward.

In terms of the deployment, we designed everything properly, and due to the fact that we took the time to design it correctly, it didn't take a long time. Strategy-wise, we have AT&T as our provider. That said, we have set up a reference architecture in such a way that it just copies every site, according to our site size and the requirements.

If you compare VeloCloud to, for example, Cisco, the pricing is almost the same. However, Cisco offers more features that are integral to the way we need the solution to operate. In that sense, it's better value for money. For example, now we need to have an extra LTE modem outside of VeloCloud, and it's going to add to the cost, which ultimately makes it more expensive.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We are not using the newest version of the solution. They already have a newer version, however, we have everything outsourced to AT&T, and they have not upgraded the new version on it yet. The version we have on the VeloCloud is 3.4.3, and the newest version, which, from my understanding, is four, and is already out there.

The greatest advice I have for potential new users is this: when you do deploy the VeloCloud, it's pretty straightforward. However, the only thing you have to remember is to make sure that you have the site requirements in terms of the primary and secondary circuits. For us, the last mile circuit is always a requirement, so we have a tertiary as a cellular. That way, even if the primary and secondary go down, you are okay. Also, you need to make sure to size your VeloCloud equipment or VeloCloud model according to the size of your needs.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine.

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.

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 solution offers ISP support for customers.

I love the solution because of its many features like cluster and cloud VPN.

The solution needs improvement for the security features and should include two firewalls. Cloud VPN can’t support any link. The solution needs to also improve the availability of centralized internal management. 

It needs to have debug detection and Deep Packet Detection features as well. 

The documentation for VMware is also hard to find.

I have been working with the solution for three months.

I am using the solution in a virtual machine and cannot comment on its stability. However, I think that the solution is stable because, in Libya, ISP uses this technology and many customers use it.

The solution is scalable and very important for quality view.

I worked with the solution in virtual Azure and it is complex. However, I think in the real scenario, the deployment should be more flexible.

I have evaluated Cisco SD-WAN and Fortinet SD-WAN. There is a need for more features in these solutions.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. The product is intuitive and easy to use. The solution is suitable for both medium companies and enterprise ones. I would recommend it for customers who have many branches.

VMware SD-WAN is used for security and virtualization.

The most valuable feature of VMware SD-WAN is security. Additionally, the integration and configuration are easier to do than with other solutions, such as Cisco.

I have been using VMware SD-WAN for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

We have approximately 200 customers using this solution.

The support from VMware SD-WAN is knowledgeable.

I rate the support from VMware SD-WAN a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of VMware SD-WAN was simple. However, it took six days to complete.

We use a third party to deploy the solution.

The price of VMware SD-WAN is less expensive than some solutions, such as Cisco.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware SD-WAN a nine out of ten.