VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN Reviews

It is very simple to configure. When you use the cloud to configure the equipment, it has zero-touch provisioning.

Its integration with the security systems would be a nice implementation. They can also consider using a management platform for both network and security operations. This would be a great improvement.

Its initial setup is not complex. It is very simple. Its deployment took about one month.

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

The most valuable features are the orchestration layer, plug and play capabilities, and also the fact that you can either configure it as a full mesh or hard install. Even though fully meshed is limited, it is still a good feature.

There are a number of customers we have that require a fully mashed SD-WAN on VeloCloud that is not available currently. If you compare the reporting tool to all other tools that you use for customers for MPLS, they are not as granular. Additionally, the security could be better and increasing the capabilities for fully meshed architectural typology would be beneficial.

I have been using the solution for approximately two years.

This solution is scalable, most of our clients are enterprise size companies. 

The technical support is there if we need them. We are a premium partner to VMware, if there are issues that you cannot resolve internally, we reach out to them and they give us the help we need.

We currently use a few solutions other than this one such as Meraki. When picking the best solution for our clients, the best depends on the use case. It depends on the customer requirements, what they are looking for and then we will recommend the best fit based on our offering.

The installation is easy.

The price is reasonable for this solution, but the only challenge for us is that the Rand currency fluctuates to the dollar and provides some complexities. The price might go up just because the Rand has actually lost value.

This solution is at a very high level, and quite good. However, it is not one platform that fits all, it depends on the use case and what the customer looking for. You might find customers that want security or other UTM based features, which VeloCloud does not offer. It weighs heavily on the customer requirements, but if security is what they are after then I would not generally recommend the VeloCloud offering.

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

My company works with a wide range of SD-WAN services to bring such solutions to clients.

The use cases depend, as they vary from client to client. One of them is application prioritization, and cost always comes into play when replacing a traditional MPLS network.

Some of the service providers that use VeloCloud as their SD-WAN should be enabled to have better global visibility.

We have been working with VMware SD-WAN over the past 12 months.

I have been in contact with technical support and they have been good.

Some of the products that we work with or have experience with are Cisco SD-WAN, Silver Peak, and VMware's VeloCloud.

In my experience, the setup process has been fairly straightforward.

I would rate this solution a seven 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.

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.

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. 

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.

We use VeloCloud as our SD-WAN solution.

The most valuable feature is the dynamic multipath optimization. This is something that other competing products do not have.

Zero-touch provisioning makes it very easy to set up.

The single path optimization features are useful.

There is no security included, which is something that should be improved. For example, they should at least include basic firewall capabilities.

I have been using VeloCloud for six months.

The stability of VeloCloud is good.

Scalability-wise, this is a good solution. We have a large company but our group makes up just a small part of the network, with perhaps 50 users. This includes regular business owners and home users.

Prior to VeloCloud, we used Fortinet. However, the SD-WAN is not as good, which is why we switched over.

The initial setup is really easy.

Once you connect the appliance to the internet, you manage the policies and that enables SD-WAN.

The pricing is very comparable to Fortinet.

This is a product that I like. For anybody looking for an SD-WAN, this is a really good option, and probably one of the best. My only real complaint is about the lack of security. If security is their primary goal, then I would suggest implementing Fortinet instead. On the other hand, if SD-WAN is the primary concern then choose VeloCloud.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am a consultant with a solution provider and this is one of the products that we advise our clients on. We do not implement solutions as part of our offering.

The dashboard is very comprehensive, where you can see all of the sites with a map. You can click through using the map, which is easy to do.

They make use of a combination of different internet lines, which improves quality.

There is room for improvement with respect to security.

The price of this solution should be lower.

I have been working with VeloCloud for about two years.

I think that it is a stable product.

It is a scalable system, similar to other SD-WAN solutions.

Our customers are typically multinational, on the bigger side.

As consultants, we have worked with several vendors simultaneously. We are independent and we do not propose a particular technology. Rather, we conduct and exercise with our clients and determine the best vendor based on that.

I have not completed the setup myself, but my understanding is that it is okay.

Overall, this is a good product but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.