Cisco offers two SD-WAN solutions in its portfolio.
- Cisco Viptela
- Cisco Meraki
Both the above solutions provide the ability to deploy SD-WAN services for small, medium and large Businesses. To help understand which of these solutions is suited to your requirements necessitates a clear understanding of their particular differences along with total cost of ownership and service cost.
From a high-level, the Cisco Viptela solution is designed and suited for offering network services to large complex Enterprises and offered as a co-managed or fully managed solution. It provides highly configurable features like deep packet inspection (DPI), support for advanced routing and refined orchestration. Meraki offers an out of the box solution and is ideal for the majority of branch office needs with easy to configure wireless. Viptela is complex solution and will require an experienced Viptella Engineer to design and implement the solution whereas Meraki, in comparison, is simple to design, implement and manage.
To start comparing both the solutions, it is good to begin with understanding the number of WAN link requirements. While Meraki can support dual WAN circuits with LTE as a backup only, Viptela is able to support additional requirements and can support cellular wireless as a primary circuit which can be used for load balancing.
Viptela is mostly installed within a data centre or as an element of Cloud architecture and can be hosted inside your own private cloud infrastructure on a physical or virtual appliance. Viptela provides excellent support for network segmentation and supports many VPN tunnels, whereas Meraki only supports single VPN topology deployments in a hub and spoke or full mesh VPN tunnel configuration.
Solution comparison between Viptela and Meraki
| Viptela | Meraki |
| Choice of hardware (ISR or vEdge) | Hardware dependant (MX, MS and MR only) |
| Supports more than 2 ISP/WAN connections | Support up to 2 ISP/WAN connections |
| LTE (4G) can be a primary link and can be used for traffic load-balancing | LTE as backup only when primary WAN links fail |
| Support for multiple VPNs, LAN and WAN segmentation with multiple topologies. | 1 mesh/Hub-Spoke topology |
| Supports Service Chaining | Not supported |
| VSmart offers centralized management and supports in-depth application analysis, deep packet inspection and traffic prioritization | Manage you LAN/WAN, wireless and security from the same Dashboard in Cloud |
| Optimize SaaS applications, automatic control the existing WAN connections to calculate the best path to cloud applications | Supports tracking of SaaS applications and examine delays on LAN/WAN to quickly identify where an issue exists |
| Supports all routing Protocols | Limited OSPF and BGP support |
| Deploy the management servers in your datacenter or hosted by a third party | Manage all your organization WAN links through Meraki dashboard |
| Complex to Manage and Implement | Simple to manage and Implement |
| High TCO | Low TCO |
| Excellent HA capability | No appropriate HA implementation (Warm Spare Only) |
| All features are at your disposal | Some feature enablement requires Meraki TAC support |
| Full support of SSL inspection | SSL Inspection (recently introduced in 15.11 rel) The additional overhead of decrypting and inspecting client traffic significantly reduces the security appliance’s throughput capabilities. Compared to a stateful firewall a reduction of 85-90% of throughput may be seen. |
Meraki Solution Components
With Meraki you can pick and choose what components you require
- Meraki Dashboard – Cloud managed service
- Firewall – MX line of products ( MX64 to MX450, vMX)
- Wireless – MR line of products (Indoor/Outdoor Access Points)
- Switching – MS line of products (Offer stackable layer 2/3 switches)
Viptela Solution Components
With Viptela you must deploy the four main components for the solution to work. All these components have a very specific role as described below:
- vManage – Management Dashboard
- vEdge – Data Plane, (vEdge, Cisco ASR/ISR/ENCS, Whitebox)
- vBond – The Orchestrator
- vSmart – The Controller