On 2025-09-15 08:13, Mike Hammett via NANOG wrote:
One of the results of another thread mentioned that some SD-WAN
technologies employ packet duplication across multiple WAN circuits as
a part of their service. What are your experiences like with platforms
like that? What would your recommendation be for a fairly low bit rate
requirement of packet duplication?
$DAYJOB-1 had three SDWAN flavors. (Note that these impressions are a
few years old as of now.)
Barracuda: Packet duplication required both WAN links to have nearly the
same latency. It worked, but deployment was limited to one or two
customers, and we didn't support it.
Viptela: Packet duplication worked well.
* The setup was a bit convoluted, but it was granular enough to packet
duplicate types of traffic.
* When I left, we had it working with a few customers. No issues that I
remember.
* IIRC we mostly used Viptela packet dupe for voice.
* I don't remember what the SDWAN logs looked like, but I want to say
that it was clear what the policy was doing.
Versa: Packet duplication worked well also.
* Setup was easy and granular, similar to a firewall rule base. It's
easy to enable packet dupe for specific flows.
* Maybe 10 or so customers had it configured. Typical setup was (2) WAN
circuits, but some packet dupe customers had (3) or more.
* We had Versa packet dupe working for voice, medical imaging, and
general Internet access.
* The few packet dupe issues that customers raised were not issues with
the Versa platform.
* The result of an SDWAN policy decision is easy to see; the logs are
structured similar to firewall logs.
Versa is my first choice for SDWAN-specific features, especially packet
duplication and traffic routing. Its robust packet capture ability saved
us more than a few times. (Viptela packet capture wasn't bad on the old
hardware, but the C1k / C8k platforms aren't the same as the vEdges.)
Historically, Versa struggled with their NG firewall feature set back in
2017-2018. I'm sure the bugs are worked out by now, but do test that
thoroughly if you intend to use those features.
Viptela is a solid second choice, especially if you don't want to
onboard another vendor. Packet dupe works as advertised.
Feel free to hit me up on- or off-list with further questions.
HTH,
-Brian
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