VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN Reviews

We use the solution as an SD-WAN; we provide one connectivity with MPLS service on remote premises or virtually. By that, I mean anywhere on the planet. We have something like 190 or 200 sites being rolled out on all continents, with stuff in Japan and soon to come in Korea and China. We have a site in the USA, Norway, Sweden, Italy, France, and the UK.

It's part of a SaaS (software as a service) solution.

We are using VMware only on some of our setups. For most of it, we are using custom development. We are using the VMware solution only when we have no other choices, either due to the fact that the customer doesn't want us to come with a custom solution and prefer an off-the-shelf standard that is a fully supported solution by a third party. We prefer to come up with our own custom SD-WAN solution whenever we can.

The solution is a good off-the-shelf choice with full support.

It's stable and reliable.

The solution can scale. 

We found the initial setup to be pretty straightforward.

The solution is pricey. It could be cheaper.

Support could be more helpful or responsive.

We've been using the solution for three or four years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

It is a scalable solution. That said, as you expand, your costs rise. 

Most of the time, the tech support is not active enough. What we typically have is our own level two and level three skill sets on board, and we manage to fix the solution ourselves.

Relying on third-party support is really for when we have no other choice. Most of the time, they are not proactive enough or don't know enough about what we're doing, so we try to get away as much as possible from this type of support. 

We are not a traditional end user or customer. We are an integrator or service operator. As such, when we have an issue, basically, we are already the last line of support for our customers. That's why we're also mixing different technologies. If we're having trouble with one technology on one side, we can easily swap and basically migrate to another technology to sort out the situation.

We also use homemade solutions.

The solution offers a very easy setup. It's not overly complex. 

It took some time for the initial site due to the ramp-up of the skills and understanding of exactly what to do and what not to do. Right now, the site takes between 15 and 30 minutes to deploy.

We are an integrator on a hosting company, so basically, we can handle the initial setup process.

The solution can get expensive as you grow. 

We have about 200 clients using the solution. 

The licensing costs are part of a subscription from us. In other words, we are the owner of the license, so we are providing a service. It's up to us to deliver a service that is working. The benefit of the solution is that we can pick up anything that can work and meet the requirements. The customer doesn't really have much to say, except for some customers that are really picky and really have very special business requirements or because they are very large. 

We've evaluated Juniper as well. 

We gave up looking at this solution either due to the fact that the scope of features was not matching the requirements or the pricing model was not matching what we could do as a SaaS service operator.

We use both on-premises and cloud deployments.

I'm not sure which exact version we're using.

We're a service provider.

This is one of many SD-WAN technologies I'd recommend to clients. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

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.

VMware SD-WAN can be deployed on the cloud and on-premise. We use Microsoft and AWS as our cloud services.

The most valuable feature of VMware SD-WAN is the virtualization platform. You can use the software on any hardware. Additionally, the solution is easy to use.

VMware SD-WAN can improve on the security features.

In a future release, VMware SD-WAN could improve by adding a VPN without IPsec.

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

VMware SD-WAN is a stable solution.

The scalability of VMware SD-WAN is good.

We have under 100 people using the solution in my organization.

We have vendor support from VMware SD-WAN and the service they provide is of a medium level.

Neutral

The initial setup of VMware SD-WAN is straightforward. The time it took to implement took weeks. We tried to implement the solution slowly and securely over time.

We did the implementation of VMware SD-WAN in-house.

We have approximately 10 to 15 people that maintain and support the solution.

The return on investment has not been achieved. It is taking longer than anticipated.

The solution's price combines the license and the bandwidth you used.

I rate the cost of VMware SD-WAN a four out of five.

My advice to others is that not every SD-WAN solution fits every customer or requirement. If the requirements work with the solution, I would recommend using VMware SD-WAN. It's a good solution.

I rate VMware SD-WAN an eight out of ten.

We use VMware to install some servers and virtual appliances.

It can be deployed on cloud and on-premises.

We have a team of five engineers.

Only one of our customers uses this solution. They're a medium-size enterprise.

It can be used for load balancing and load sharing. It's easy to use and customizable.

The dashboards could be improved.

I have used this solution for one year.

I would rate the stability as 10 out of 10.

It's scalable. I would rate the scalability as eight out of ten.

I would rate technical support as eight out of ten. I haven't faced any challenges.

Deployment took two hours.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. I would recommend it.

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.

VMware SD-WAN is a layer 7 firewall.

We're doing POCs and getting a lot of good feedback from customers about VMware. They see how simple it is to deploy and how it reduces the number of employees needed on the network team. 

I like VMware SD-WAN's automation and zero-touch provisioning. Its main advantage is simplicity. Anyone can use this gateway.

Security is a challenge. I would like to see VMware add things like IPS, IDS, and web filtering. These features are the future of security, and most competing firewalls have them. We already have layer 7, but that is not enough for a headquarters. Maybe it's okay for a branch office.

We have been a VMware partner for three years.

VMware SD-WAN is highly stable. We haven't had any complaints about lost connections or the need to restart devices. 

VMware's scalability is good so far. We have 100 devices. 

We opened many tickets with VMware support in the last month. It's good, and they usually respond in under 24 hours. I rate VMware support five out of five.

Setting up VMware SD-WAN is simple and smooth. I would rate it four out of five for ease of deployment. 

I rate VMware SD-WAN eight out of 10. If you are looking for automation and want to free up your IT to focus on other things, I recommend VMware SD-WAN.

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.

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.