SASE

Customer Corner, January 2022

Happy January! We enjoyed the holiday break, but now we’re back, hitting the ground running and coming up with content and offerings that will help you, our valued customers!

We have several ways to engage with our team right away: sign up to see us at a webinar or use some of the knowledge below to improve your workflow.

  • Upcoming SASE webinars! Plus, Anywhere Workspace Strategy Roadmap Event, January customer webinar, and February VMware Edge Network Intelligence Deep Dive Webinar
  • Check your VMware SD-WAN Edge version using our releases criteria
  • Customer spotlight: Bancolombia
  • Tips and tricks: Deactivate hub VPN
  • VMware Edge Network Intelligence webinar recording
  • Ordering update for VMware Secure Access

As always, let us know how we are doing, and please check out the details below. Have a topic you’d like to see covered in an upcoming newsletter? Let us know!

Don’t miss the SASE customer webinar January 20th

Join us for an hour of SASE/SD-WAN content. In the January edition we will cover fine-tuning SD-WAN business policies, how we choose our recommended Edge versions, and a few other topics.

Sign up here for the session on January 20th at 11am ET.

VMware Edge Network Intelligence Deep Dive Webinar February 2nd

Join us for an hour of deep-dive content with our product management and engineering team. We’ll cover how VMware Edge Network Intelligence works and how you can get some great insights into your edge network.

Morning session: February 2nd at 11am ET

Evening session: February 2nd at 8pm ET

Americas Anywhere Workspace Strategy Roadmap event January 20th

We would like to invite you to an open and collaborative discussion about VMware’s Anywhere Workspace Strategy on Thursday, January 20th at 8 am PT. In this session, we will come together and discuss strategy, innovation and provide input on where we are headed. We have made significant investments in our strategy, and we are enthusiastic about the future!

During this interactive session, we will discuss the following topics that are highly relevant in today’s world: Securing the Distributed Edge, Automating the Workspace, and Managing Multi-Modal Employee Experiences.

Please use this link to register today and join us in this interactive session of sharing and networking!

Making sense of VMware SD-WAN recommended releases

Want to know if you are using the best version for your VMware SD-WAN Edge? We’ve got you covered. Our center of excellence team reviews all of the Edge versions and makes recommendations for the best version to be on. In most cases sticking with the recommended or stable release is the best choice, however, if you are looking for a specific feature you can use this guide to help figure out what the best release for your Edge would be.

  • Recent or New Releases 
    • VMware denotes recent or new releases that are less than two months old and have not had significant adoption in the minor branch (the Y in X.Y.Z). Customers typically move to a new code level when a feature requirement they need is published in the .0 version. At the time of this writing, 4.5.0 is the latest and most recent release. It is also the version that supports VMware SASE.
  • Stable Release
    • A stable release must be more than two months old with a significant number of Edges and customers deployed on the minor version code train (the Y in X.Y.Z). It is also imperative that no major P1 bugs are found with no fix available. 
  • Recommended Release
    • The recommended release must also be more than two months old.  The threshold to becoming a recommended release is double the threshold of the stable release. The recommended designation is reserved for one of the latest releases of the major branch.

Special note, with new releases, it is important to check the release notes as hotfixes may be released with the same version. For example, see the revision history of 4.5.0 release notes.

View the SD-WAN Recommended Releases KB Article.

VMware SD-WAN connects banking institution to its branches and ATMs

SD-WAN cut costs, sped branch connections

Bancolombia invested in VMware SD-WAN to simplify branch office networks, increase bandwidth, provide branch offices with a higher speed, and optimize application performance in the hybrid cloud. Year after year, the organization had the challenge of expanding the bandwidth of its MPLS links across the entire branch network, which involved high costs in time and money.

The telecommunications division analyzed WAN solutions to reduce connectivity costs and comply with local security regulations. The research team validated several solutions and market trends and tested solutions, not only with VMware but also with other manufacturers, and ultimately chose VMware SD-WAN.

Bancolombia office building

To learn more about this use case, read and watch the full case study here.

Tips and tricks: Deactivate hub VPN

This month’s tip comes from our Support Engineering team. When you are using a hub and spoke design along with hub profiles (recommended), you want to ensure you are not enabling branch to branch VPN tunnels on those hub profiles.  The default behavior we are looking for the Spoke to initiate the VPN tunnel to the specified hubs.  We do not want it initiated by the hub.  Enabling branch to branch VPN on a hub profile could cause the hubs to initiate VPN tunnels to spokes that are not preferred, which can greatly complicate traffic flows and troubleshooting. 

Learn more about hub design here.

VMware Edge Network Intelligence webinar recording

We had a great VMware Edge Network Intelligence customer webinar last month. If you missed it, check out the recording (Access Passcode: zkg0#TeH) and send it to anyone else who might be interested.

We had fun covering all things VMware Edge Network Intelligence reviewing all the new UI changes as well as sharing some of these BIG new features! Don’t forget to check out the recording to hear from our experts Travis Carlson (Product Manager) and Anand Srinivas (Senior Engineer).

Ordering update for VMware Secure Access

For any questions, please contact your VMware account team or VMware Partner.

With the aim to make quoting and ordering easier, we will now have one set of VMware Secure Access™ SKUs (SA-HD-x-xxx-C). As a result, we will retire NB-VC-AD-HRA-xxx-C SKUs on January 28th, 2022. This update doesn’t bring any change to the product or its pricing. Both sets of SKUs were introduced with the VMware Secure Access launch in June 2020 and hence no action is needed on your end to add or replace any SKUs.