I am the head of infrastructure at a construction company with 1,0001-5000 employees.
We are currently researching VMware NSX and Meraki SD-WAN. What is the biggest difference between the two? Which would you recommend?
Thanks! I appreciate the help.
We are currently reviewing various SD-WAN vendors for our infrastructure and what I found lacking with Cisco Meraki is that you cannot use Active/Active HA with two MX devices. Only HA is available with one device which introduces a single point of failure for any network. There is also up to 5 minute failover time for Active/Active circuits which in my opinion is quite long compared to other solutions which are nearer instant.
VMware NSX is VMware's data center networking platform that supports among other things VxLAN that provides micro-segmentation to ensure optimal performance and security (both north/south and east/west). VMware SD-WAN solution is through their acquisition of Velocloud, which is the market leader in the space. Meraki SD-WAN is owned by Cisco. Meraki SD-WAN is a simple, quick to implement, all-in-one solution that is cloud managed and great for smaller offices. Cisco's higher end, feature rich SD-WAN solution is through their Viptela offering. Cisco's leading data center offering is ACI. Many SMBs are going with a managed service that use Cisco or VMware's solution. Cisco and VMware do not integrate well, so it is best to choose one vendor or the other.
VMware NSX is all about Software Defined Networking ie virtualizing the 7 layers of switches/routers that we know in the physical HW world. VMware is very successful with this technology acquired from NICERA. SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined WAN which is about networking but NOT at the local level, it is a wide area network. For this VMware made another acquisition which is VeloCloud. Cisco Meraki SD-WAN and VeloCloud are both in the magic quadrant and therefore competing.
Well, both products are very good but if you are looking for only SD-WAN Feafure than Cisco Meraki is the perfect solution: it's easy to manage, easy to deploy and deep insight at the packet level.
VMware NSX is the complete package of comprehensive features like Application Load Balancing, routing, switching, micro-segmentation and many more but at a cost! It's very easy to manage from a single pane of glass.
in a nutshell, if you want Application-Aware Load balancing and wan optimization which should be easy to manage and deploy than Cisco Meraki is the right product and if you are looking for a fully integrated solution and have a deep pocket then you should choose VMware NSX.
Meraki SD-WAN is ranked 2nd in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with 11 reviews while VMware NSX is ranked 1st in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with 19 reviews. Meraki SD-WAN is rated 8.0, while VMware NSX is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Meraki SD-WAN writes "Enables us to get valuable information from the system without having to go into every single device". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware NSX writes "Enables us to identify problems before they manifest, but they should develop more advanced features". Meraki SD-WAN is most compared with VeloCloud, Cisco SD-WAN and Cradlepoint NetCloud, whereas VMware NSX is most compared with Cisco ACI, Cisco Tetration and Nutanix Flow.