VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN Reviews

We use this solution to increase our network bandwidth between sites in our company. For example, there are two internet lines and one NPOS network in Taipei and one SD-WAN solution in Poland. The VCE connects these lines and networks to our LAN switch which increases our bandwidth.

If one circuit crashes, we are able to switch to a second circuit without any disruption in connection. 

In the future, we would like to have more capacity using this solution as there are limitations on the VCE. For example, only 50 tunnels can be supported currently but we would like to have 200 tunnels using the VeloCloud VCE device.

The security function on the VCE could be improved as we need to purchase another device to protect our setup. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

We previously used the FortiGate SD-WAN solution. When using this solution, we experienced application disconnection if the network failed. This does not happen with VeloCloud. 

A vendor assisted us with the setup of this solution. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

The primary use cases of this solution are global WAN refreshment, Campus-to-Campus connectivity, and because my client is a global customer, they want zero-touch provisioning.

It's true, zero-touch provisioning. Anyone can migrate over to VeloCloud, it's that simple, just plug in the necessary cables and it's done.

Security needs improvement.

Also, it needs better scalability. There are certain products that if you need to create extra, the company expands and they will bring on extra branch-to-branch connectivity. There is a point where you will have to move to new hardware. We would need a larger scope for scalability.

I don't want to deploy a number of VeloClouds, and then in one year after business acquisitions, they need scalability. The only way to do that would be to remove the hardware and replace it with the new hardware.

I have been using VeloCloud, on and off for 18 months.

We are using the latest version, but not in a deep dive method.

It's stable, definitely.

It's a scalable solution. We have approximately 700 sites at the moment, and it's growing more as we adopt Microsoft Azure for this particular customer. So, we will need to spin up virtual instances of VeloCloud in Azure Regions.

The whole company is going through a restructuring where they're going to segregate portions of the business. They'll have their own VeloCloud SD-WAN overlay instance, integrating into the Cloud.

We have not contacted technical support. We have someone in our company that addresses anything obscure. He has a fair bit of experience that began prior to our engagement.

The initial setup is simple. SD-WAN is the simplest, and anyone can do it.

To deploy VeloCloud itself takes approximately one hour.

In IT, things don't always go to plan, but for the most part, it's an hour.

I used a consultant to help with deployment.

For the maintenance of each region, there will be a network SME to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

I will continue to use this solution, we have another customer that wants to use SD-WAN, but they are better suited for Cisco Meraki, so we are just doing a proof of concept with them.

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. 100%. That said, it needs better security. There is always room to improve.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use VeloCloud for software for reports SD-WAN solutions and WAN connectivity.

They should help our customers reduce the cost of the implementation from a local user cloud to the user using a standard cloud. They should improve the time and the cost of the implementation.

I would like for them to upgrade to 5G integration. Our customers have 4G now and the connectivity isn't good. It should be much faster. 

I have been using VeloCloud for ten years. 

The stability depends on the network connectivity. If the Internet connection isn't stale, it will affect it. 

We contact our partners to get local support. 

The initial setup was very simple. It's user-friendly. It only takes a few hours, not days, to deploy for somebody who is experienced. We use it on a daily basis. 

We used a system integrator for the deployment. From the second year onwards, the maintenance is done by our local partners. 

There are up to 100 users. 

It's not cheap but it's affordable. 

I would absolutely recommend VeloCloud because it's user-friendly and because the integration is easier than with other solutions. 

I would rate VeloCloud a nine out of ten. 

The most valuable feature of VMware SD-WAN is flexibility. It is more flexible than other vendors.

VMware SD-WAN could improve by having more partnerships with other vendors.

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

VMware SD-WAN can be used for on-premise and cloud integrations. Many scenarios are supported in the solution. They are flexible for many services.

I rate VMware SD-WAN a ten 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.

The product’s most valuable feature is DMPO.

VMware SD-WAN is complicated to configure.

We have been using VMware SD-WAN for one and a half years.

I rate the product’s scalability a seven out of ten.

Versa Secure SD-WAN has more advanced security features compared to VMware SD-WAN.

The initial setup is straightforward. However, it is complex to configure.

I rate VMware SD-WAN a seven out of ten. I recommend it for smaller companies as bigger companies require some advanced features. The product’s reporting, security, and troubleshooting features need improvement.

We use VMware SD-WAN primarily to connect branch offices to our data center and to connect users to the application. Users could be in any place, working from home, in remote locations, and branch offices. Applications can be anywhere in the cloud in IaaS, in the platform as a service, on-premise, and at private data centers. The deployment process of SD-WAN is to connect securely so users with the application can perform well.

There is a feature called DMPO (Dynamic Multipath Optimization) which is good. Here in Latin America, the quality of the internet is very poor. So what DMPO does, well, in a branch office or in a work from home environment, we can have bad quality internet links, but with the IT team, SD-WAN or VeloCloud, the DMPO makes the link a Smartlink. For example, if the link is presenting packet loss, the VMware solution applies a remediation algorithm. For packet loss, DMPO introduces packet cloning so we send the packet twice. We recover all the packets despite the link having packet loss. If we have two or three internet links, we can also summarize all the links together so, this basically increases the packet capacity. It also decreases the timing of the VeloCloud Gateway.

VeloCloud Gateways are instant and deployed globally so we can create a DMPO tunnel on-premise to a VeloCloud Gateway and then serve SaaS applications. At corporate headquarters, there are three internet links, but employees were experiencing poor quality of Microsoft Teams. So all the Microsoft Office 365 traffic was sent from the location to a VeloCloud Gateway. The VeloCloud Gateway tunnel is protected by the DMPO, so users have a better experience. With Office 365 applications like Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and Azure, the DMPO features increase the performance of the applications because it can remediate bad quality links.

The solution doesn't have CLI (command line interface), but it's not needed because the graphic user interface is very nice. You can do everything, but when we are troubleshooting, we can't execute commands as fast as we'd like because the graphic user interface is very slow. So although the solution has a CLI, VeloCloud doesn't. I'd like for VMware to introduce CLI. The solution also needs stronger routing Broadcom support because we cannot deploy VeloCloud in bigger enterprises that have that kind of complex browsing protocol.

VMware does not work well if the enterprise has a very complex routing environment.

I have been using VMare for 2 years.

VMware works perfectly for most small and medium businesses with simple and basic routing, but not for large enterprises that have complex routing environments.

I would give VMware SD-WAN a nine out of ten.  

Deploying SD-WAN is very easy. When we deploy it on-premise, we need to get SD-WAN or VeloCloud X. When VeloCloud X affects any kind of form factor, it needs to to be a hardware box, it could be a server or it can virtualize in any Hypervisor like Hyper-V or IBM in order to support any kind of form factor. To deploy it in the cloud with Amazon, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure, the features are configured in a central manager called SD-WAN Orchestrator. Then the device is shifted to the location and it only needs one internet connection. When the device connects to the internet it downloads the configurations necessary and that's the SD-WAN deployment process.

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.