Cisco Catalyst 8000V SD-WAN & Router - PAYG - DNA Essentials

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN  has been in use for a year and a half, which is when we first started deploying it. We are now finalizing that deployment in our environment and are almost exclusively switching over from our old SD-WAN solution to the Cisco-based one.

I appreciate the control that we have with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN . With the previous solution that we had, we could not build independent tunnels to each SD-WAN appliance, as they were all aggregated. Now we have considerably more freedom. We no longer have to speculate whether one thing going down means we lose an entire region of the firm; instead, everything is site-by-site based.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN helps us specifically through the control of policies. With Catalyst, we are able to build out these policies at a regional level. Rather than relying on a centralized location, we have been able to distribute this across the country. We are able to target bigger regions and optimize traffic flow for those specific regions instead of being locked into whatever the previous vendor was providing us.

For our environment, there are some bugs with how we interpret data in terms of circuit usage, for example. This has been on our to-do list for a while because it has been broken. We have not been able to get it to work quite right specifically for our environment. We have been trying to get support and push for that resolution because for our metrics, it is valuable. Having a blank screen instead of this data can be intimidating, so we are trying to get that fixed.

I have been working in my field professionally for about three years.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has been fine for the most part. We tend to play it safe and use versions that have been tested more thoroughly, rather than necessarily old versions. Issues we might have run into stem from us being out of date, such as wanting to implement and use something that was actually on a newer version that we just had not had time to upgrade to.

I would rate Cisco's operational efficiency in my IT environment very highly. At this point, we are almost an entirely Cisco-based organization, and everything that we operate on for the most part is Cisco-based. We have good support from Cisco, and I think we are happy with how everything is going.

Before, our solution was VMware VeloCloud , which was then purchased by Arista recently, and that is what we are switching away from.

I was not involved with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing too much. We did run into some licensing issues in the beginning, but it was through the vendor and the provider that we were using, not necessarily a Cisco thing. If that had not been involved, the process would have been smoother.

The increased uptime with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has been a return on investment.

We have been focusing on fast deployment and then going back to tweak policies and figure out which features we want. I would rate this review a 10.

The main use case is WAN connectivity.

The features that I like the most about Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN  are that it is secure, cheaper, and once you know it, it's easy to deploy.

An example of how these features have benefited our organization is that we have reduced latency and we can troubleshoot faster for packet loss and jitter.

I think Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN  could be improved because too many vulnerabilities come up, so upgrading it is a challenge, and the hardware keeps changing; we moved from Viptela 1K to 2K, then again to the Cisco Catalyst  router, so it's an expense.

We have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in our new company for eight years.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN scales with the growing needs of our organization at a level of eight.

I evaluate the customer service and tech support as good support.

Before adopting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, a decision had already been made regarding the solution when I was onboarded.

I describe the experience with deploying Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN as initial deployment taking some time, but once deployed, it's easy to roll out changes.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very tedious.

Cisco does not optimize the experience in a hybrid or distributed enterprise setup for us since we don't have hybrid; it's all on-premises.

We face no specific challenges with hybrid and distributed enterprise networks because we don't have hybrid networks.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility offered by Cisco is that it is a managed solution, and while we reach out to our managed vendor for visibility, I think it is something we should explore more; during troubleshooting, we don't use that tool as much as we would prefer.

I give this review an overall rating of nine.

I have used Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN  as a customer. I am a customer of Cisco, and I have been a customer rather than a partner of Cisco.

The features are useful, but it is more about how insightful these features are and how easily you are able to understand the flow and mitigate a threat. Although those features exist in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN , the lack of visibility makes it very difficult to find out what precisely is being monitored through the advanced threat prevention features of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela solution. The features are undoubtedly useful, but at the end of the day, it boils down to how easily you can see the insights provided by the solution. I feel Cisco slightly lacks in that aspect. It could be because the hardware itself is a router with added security functionality, while in Fortinet or Palo Alto, those systems are intrinsically firewalls with security capabilities built-in, and routing added on top. Hence, the visibility part in those solutions is better compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, since it is not a logging device.

I have found some other solutions more insightful and user-friendly as compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but the basic SD-WAN functionality is good enough. I am using it only because it was done as a pilot project, specifically for my 60 to 70 sites. For the majority of the sites, I am using Fortinet's Secure SD-WAN solution and I found that more viable and more in alignment with my requirements.

For example, there is not any Internet Service Database available in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN intrinsically. If I want to write a policy based on applications, I am not able to write it, at least in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela deployment that we have done, and that is fairly easy to do in Fortinet. The second issue is the logging capability. I think the visibility that Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has is not even comparable. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN does not provide that sort of insight or control as far as traffic steering is concerned.

With respect to the SLAs, I barely know which sort of SLAs are violated in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, so I do not have clear visibility on where the traffic is moving from at my spoke or hub locations. I believe Fortinet gives me a very clear picture of where the traffic is going. Overall visibility, whether it is data traffic or logs, is much better in Fortinet compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.

The complexity of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela is noticeable and quite complicated to configure. If something breaks, you have to involve TAC and others to fix it. On the contrary, you can work with underlays. Even if your IPsec overlay tunnel is down, it does not impact your production. Thus, we find Fortinet's solution significantly better than Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution.

I have used Application-aware Routing in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. However, I found it to be very complicated, especially regarding policy writing. For my breakout of VC traffic, we had to write a bunch of IP addresses for Zoom, Webex , and others. Presently, it can only identify Webex  as an application, and I highly doubt whether there is any application identification for Zoom and other platforms, as we were not able to find it during our implementation. It is done through static whitelisting of the IPs, which is not a scalable solution since IPs can change at any time. Overall, the application-aware routing policies are not as flexible and scalable as the Internet Service Database feature of Fortinet provides.

The struggles encompass policy writing, logging capabilities, traffic visibility, and complex configuration. There is also the issue of load balancing. We have faced considerable challenges with traffic load balancing between the links. Although the SLA targets are configurable, understanding how traffic flows is challenging, making troubleshooting exceedingly difficult. Overall, I find it a quite complicated solution with not that much operational usability.

I have been working with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for close to two and a half years now.

The basic functionality and the control connections created are complicated, and a simple issue in the control connections between the fabric causes numerous complexities that demand extensive troubleshooting time.

It is done through static whitelisting of the IPs, which is not a scalable solution since IPs can change at any time.

The complexity of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela is noticeable and quite complicated to configure. If something breaks, you have to involve TAC and others to fix it.

We are using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN infrastructure primarily because we have invested in it after using ISR 4K routers and the legacy IWAN solution, which is the predecessor of SD-WAN, Intelligent WAN. Since the devices still have an operational life left, we want to leverage that.

I have already settled with Cisco ISE  after visiting the website a few months ago where I researched Cisco ISE  and other Cisco products. I have already procured the Cisco ISE solution. There are some other products as well. We are using Cisco ACI  as well. Cisco ACI  stands for Application Centric Infrastructure. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela is also being used and we are using Cisco ACI as well. I am not sure how Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN supports cloud environments because our deployment is on-premises. Therefore, I cannot comment on the vAnalytics and other solutions that could enhance security or visibility since I have not used them myself. My overall review rating for this product is four out of five.

In my view, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN  would be less effective when it comes to SD-WAN functions compared to Versa.

The overall operability of Versa is better than Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN . As a seller, I still find Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN to be a little complicated.

The ease of use, interface, and implementation are better with Versa.

Functionality-wise, both Versa and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN possibly would be at par. I would not comment on that for sure, but from the deployment perspective, I still feel Versa has got an easy interface to get things managed.

The integrated threat protection and end-to-end encryption features in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN are good.

More or less, it's the same with Cisco in terms of complexity and pricing, so there's not much of a difference. They might want to consider incorporating features seen in Versa or other competitors to improve their points.

I would rate the technical support by Cisco as nine out of ten.

That's even a little bit better than what Versa has, because Cisco engineers can be found everywhere compared to Versa. This is an advantage that they carry.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is positioned ideally where customers already have Cisco routers and other equipment, making migration to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN easier. In these use cases, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is very competitive.

When discussing application-aware routing features, this is a standard feature all the OEMs are offering.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN would be more expensive compared to Versa. I have been a partner and reseller of both Versa and Cisco.

I rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN eight out of ten.