After the very successful implementation of additional Nvidia GPUs in Stage XXXVI: NVIDIA GPUs Everywhere, I wanted to play with the amazing Velocloud solution from VMware.
Velocloud is available with the Edges for your Remote Sites and Datacenters, the Gateways running at the Cloud Provider sites and the Orchestrator as a Cloud Service for Management.
I have a 1GbE, 10GbE and 40GbE network environment running at my house and 4 different internet connections available. The perfect setup for a SD-WAN solution. I was able to get a Velocloud Edge hardware appliance:
Each Edge appliance has different Use-Cases and Performance Limitations. Which one should I pick? Here is a bandwidth license list:
Here are my 4 x different Internet Connections:
- Cable Connection 400Mbit Downstream, 40Mbit Upstream
- Cable Connection 50Mbit Downstream, 5Mbit Upstream
- ADSL Connection 16Mbit Downstream, 1Mbit Upstream
- LTE Connection 200Mbit Downstream, 50Mbit Upstream
Technical details for the different Edge types:
Every internet connection at my HomeLab/HomeDC has a dedicated Modem / Router. I need a Velocloud Edge with 4 WAN ports and of course I want 10GbE LAN connection, so I choose the Edge 840 appliance.
That appliance is based on the well known Supermicro X10SDV-TP8F Mainboard.
- 4 Core Intel Xeon-D
- 32GB RAM
- 100GB SSD
- 6 x 1GbE LAN
- 2 x 10GbE SFP+
- 1 x 1GbE IPMI
The setup is very easy and done within a few minutes….
The activation was super easy and very quick:
Next step is to connect to the SD-WAN Orchestrator and configure your settings:
My Ubiquiti USG-XG-8 is still my Default Gateway, so static routes are also configured here:
I did not want to have double NAT, so special configuration in the USG Config file is needed:
The Velocloud Edge port configuration for the different LAN / WAN connections.
This is the Orchestrator Main Page with the Overview section:
The first thing after the initial setup was to check the quality of my internet connections, they are all nearly complete green. During the Corona crisis, where everyone is working from home, it changes….
Link Quality after Velocloud enhancements is green, even when the links are not very good. This is done via several methods inside the Edge appliance (Forward Error Correction, Traffic Steering, Jitter Buffering…)
The results are absolutely amazing and unbelievable! Internet is always available at my house now. Wifi Calling on the Smartphones is no problem, Video Calls are running fine and no issues at all!
You can check the transferred data of each link on the Transport Tab:
The main Use Case for the Velocloud solution inside my environment is to bundle the internet connections and create policies, which traffic should use what kind of internet speed:
Internet Upgrade Cable Connection 50/5 Mbit to 300/30 Mbit is already ordered and scheduled for beginning of May 2020.
That should bring my Downstream to over 700 Mbit and the Upstream to over 70 Mbit. Oh boy I love that solution!!!!
Internet Upgrade is done today. I love it!!!!!
Check out the next episode of my HomeLab / HomeDC journey: