Working from home – VeloCloud SD WAN Trial

Cavell closely follows COVID-19’s impact on the Cloud Networking and Communications industry.  So, when VMware announced a free trail for home working we jumped on the chance to gain hands on experience.  Thanks to VeloCloud for taking the initiative to run these free trials.

We are still in midst of the trial, and will blog later about any technical findings.  Today I wanted to cover our experience about the operational and people aspects of using SD WAN at home.

COVID-19 means that companies have scrambled to put in place work from home solutions at large scale. SD WAN is an alternative to the most common practice of remote VPNs and can bring some advantages such as:

• Improving quality of service for business-critical applications
• Matching and perhaps improving security characteristics of VPN
• Potentially easier provisioning and less overload on centralized resources like servers.
• Higher visibility to corporate IT staff on both application and network performance.

We have consultants and instructors in 5 countries participating (Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, UK).  Most homes that received an SD WAN device have an experienced network engineer, some of which specifically specialize in SD WAN.

What we have learned so far:

• Visibility is a double edge sword, one team member’s family member was uncomfortable with having all his application use visible, so the device was never installed.
  • There is a tradeoff between keeping it simple and just having work devices behind the SD WAN CPE and gaining full benefit in terms of QoS, availability and access repair which means having all traffic traversing the SD WAN CPE.
• Improvement varies by country (access quality) with some participants reporting noticeable quality improvements and others stating everything worked perfectly before.
  • Availability does improve of course in case of failure for those using LTE version, but line failures are fairly rare.
  • Line speed is not necessarily the main determinant of perceived quality as some very high capacity lines had significant packet loss and jitter.
• Even very experienced engineers are timid about introducing change to their home network, fearing interruptions to schoolwork or spouses’ work. A spouses’ criticism will quickly stop all change and experimentation.
• Installation was pretty simple and with some pilot experience a corporation can probably build a robust process. However, some caveats to think about in the support process as being drawn into home networking issues might be difficult for IT support teams:
  • Where issues arise they often involve consumer applications, for example one of our homes had issues with Netflix, but only on TV not mobile devices
  • Often there are other family members home working so conflict could occur between two different company’s approaches.
  • Existing home WiFi and the SD WAN router WiFi can conflict.
  • Not all service providers have a modem function, separate from the router, so SD WAN box will often sit behind the broadband router, and these devices will vary by provider.