We performed a comparison between Cisco SD-WAN, Cradlepoint NetCloud, and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions."The orchestration on the VPN connection between remote locations is a fantastic feature. I used it some time ago."
"Load balancing is a feature that allows us to take the best of our links and distribute the load intelligently, always with an eye on the end-customer experience."
"The most valuable features are zero-disk provisioning and link load balancing on an application basis."
"Cisco SD-WAN has separate OMP routing."
"The first part that we like is that we can reuse certain hardware, which is a valuable asset. You can use hardware SKUs that already exist in the network. The second part that we like is the integration with the cloud and the measurement of the cloud's quality. These are the two values that this solution gives as compared to other implementations that we have seen."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The most valuable features, application awareness, and failover resilience, stand out as key considerations for users."
"The availability of services and combining different connections is most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the automatic failover."
"It is easy to set up and requires a single administrator to maintain it."
"Cradlepoint NetCloud is very stable."
"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful."
"Instead of only deploying templates, we can deploy blueprints which are easier on day-to-day operations."
"It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs."
"Our users can order VMs using the API."
"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."
"Our QA department is able to spin up a new instance of Windows virtual machine and test whatever use case they have, then turn it back down whenever they are done."
"We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine."
"The extensibility of it and the customization of a lot of the Blueprints, that you can customize, and the community as a whole. There's a ton of community-generated Blueprints that might be (helpful) to set up a design for your automation needs, that you can use as a base and go on from there and make changes to it."
"They should enhance the reporting because, as it is today, they need more executive-level reports."
"All of the configurations are based on templates, and we need to spend a lot of time doing the templates. It's good because that means that all of the configurations will be equal in the network. However, we need to spend a lot of time implementing the templates and doing the customizations."
"The solution could have a better web interface to simplify changing configurations."
"The UI has room for improvement."
"The solution should not be so bound to ISPs."
"Technical support could be more helpful and responsive."
"Cisco's router and voice gateway has not been available since the launch of SD-WAN."
"In the next release, Cisco should focus on simplifying the configuration of SD-WAN. SD-WAN has a lot of room to grow."
"The performance of group-based clouds should be enhanced."
"It is missing important settings options."
"In our situation, the initial setup was complex."
"I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting."
"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time."
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."
"They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator."
"We have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."
