Where does pfSense fit into the SD-WAN market?
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@johnpoz said in Where does pfSense fit into the SD-WAN market?:
It gives any Joe the ability to think they know networking
hahaha - good one..
I can top that. A few years ago, one customer thought she knew more about networks than I did, because her husband had read some magazines. She was upset because I had connected my computer to the switch with CAT5 cable, after we had run in CAT6. She thought it would slow everything down!
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@pimpmyrouter said in Where does pfSense fit into the SD-WAN market?:
I've just received the hardware for a SW-WAN service. It looks like a rebadged SG-5100 and this triggers me a little as it will sit next to my own SG-5100 as an extra single point of failure!
We're not an OEM so that is likely from our partner Lanner.
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Having had a SD-WAN service for 6 months, I'll summarise it...
This is a service that sits in front on my pfSense. There's one primary public facing IP address which the SD-WAN provider manages. We have 2x standard FTTC connections and one standby 4G connection, all feeding via modems into an aggregation box that the provider gave us, that is the same hardware as a SG-5100. Each connection could in extremis be fed into my SG-5100 with its own publicly addressable IP address if the provider fell down. Essentially, the provider tunnels all data from the primary IP address to their box over the 2 FTTC connections, doubling the max throughput for one connection to about 140mbps. There's some QoS magic but the packets just arrive.
So what we get is double the throughput (not the same as load balanced WANs which can't use both connections for the same download), failover resilience, and above all a consistent external IP address for our OpenVPN server, independently of which physical last mile connections are active.
I have no doubt it would be technically feasible to run our client end on the same SG-5100 unit under a pfSense package, and that would reduce the power consumption and potential for failure, but (a) that's unlikely, and (b) you'd still need a very redundant and resilient gateway somewhere else to create these tunnels.
So pfSense can't really compete, unless something else was running the external gateway ...such as Cloudflare Tunnels.
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@pimpmyrouter Yep agreed.
SDWAN and Multi-WAN(with tiers) just isnt the same thing.
But i dont think pfSense is meant to be in the SD space anyway.
