Requirements
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have strict requirements – they are probably equivalent to those of a small IT organization looking to deploy and support a few branch sites.
Few of the requirements:
- Simple to configure and setup
- Simple to manage and operate
- Must secure all traffic in transit as these tunnels will be over the public Internet
- Have the ability for a “travel” device that is plug-n-play and can automatically join the VPN
- APIs – while this may not be a requirement of a typical small organization, it was for my company as we want to programmatically make changes going forward
- Have the ability to run VRF equivalent functionality over the site to site tunnels – as the colo is built-out, we’re going to have different security domains and want to ensure traffic is easily isolated
- Limited amount of hardware on site – ideally just the routers / security appliances, so it should offer a cloud managed portal
Going with Viptela
Just due to the simplicity of the setup, it was enough to choose Viptela for me, so I cannot give an adequate comparison of all of the other SD-WAN vendors from a usability perspective. So, it is now definite that I’ll be deploying their SD-WAN solution in the very near term.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll try and post a few more articles with my progress on getting the Viptela devices turned up and into production.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to write in below!
Thanks,
Jason
@jedelman8