Office Connection

[drew]

Hi.

I'm hoping some of you gurus can help.

We have two offices that i want to connect so they can easily connect into the site and use Sage.

HQ - Wireless 500gb connection (Peplink Router with OpenVPN) - Thinking of adding an additional fibre link as we now have access to this type of connection.
Site 1 - XLN Fibre (Basic Router) Patchy service

What I wanted to do was find a way to get a solution that has a 5G fall over for Site 1 and a OpenVPN connection to the Peplink.

I'm also open to hardware firewall/vpn connections.

I know some stuff but this higher level gets a bit confusing and my TL;DR brain wont allow me to get too involved.

 

[Dangerous]

Hi.

I'm hoping some of you gurus can help.

We have two offices that i want to connect so they can easily connect into the site and use Sage.

HQ - Wireless 500gb connection (Peplink Router with OpenVPN) - Thinking of adding an additional fibre link as we now have access to this type of connection.
Site 1 - XLN Fibre (Basic Router) Patchy service

What I wanted to do was find a way to get a solution that has a 5G fall over for Site 1 and a OpenVPN connection to the Peplink.

I'm also open to hardware firewall/vpn connections.

I know some stuff but this higher level gets a bit confusing and my TL;DR brain wont allow me to get too involved.

Have a think about UniFi and their SD-WAN/Site Magic, https://ui.com/uk/en/cloud-gateways

 

[drew]

Their Cloud Gateway Ultra looks interesting unfortunately out of stock.

 

[WJA96]

For a proper commercial environment I would struggle to recommend the Ultra. The UXG is probably more where you want to be. And did you see the U-LTE-Pro automated fail-over?

LTE Pro - Ubiquiti Store

Seamless internet failover for UniFi Gateways. Bring your own SIM for LTE data.

uk.store.ui.com

It’s extremely simple to configure (no configuration really) and it just works. Yes, it’s 4G rather than 5G but if you have decent signal it’s quick enough for an emergency fail-over.

 

[Caged]

This is the sort of task that Meraki appliances excel at, especially if you are not very clued up on the technicalities of what you're doing

 

[WJA96]

Agreed, and many people still go with UniFi because of the ongoing licensing costs of Meraki.

 

[drew]

I'm not looking for super cheap, just something easy to install and leave alone.

 

[WJA96]

I'm not looking for super cheap, just something easy to install and leave alone.

If you can stomach the ongoing costs then Cisco Meraki, if not and you want to pay once then Ubiquiti UniFi does almost everything Meraki does but cheaper and no ongoing fees.

 

[drew]

Are there any benefits that i would see as a layman to the Cisco kit that make the licences worthwhile?

Looking at the Cisco Meraki GX50, assuming I need two of these at HQ and Site 1

Our Peplink has two WAN ports for the wireless so use that to provide WAN to the Meraki and then plug LAN into our Netgear Switch.

 

[WJA96]

Are there any benefits that i would see as a layman to the Cisco kit that make the licences worthwhile?

Looking at the Cisco Meraki GX50, assuming I need two of these at HQ and Site 1

Our Peplink has two WAN ports for the wireless so use that to provide WAN to the Meraki and then plug LAN into our Netgear Switch.

I don’t know the GX50 - that’s one of their new UniFi-like GO units where you pay up front for the hardware and then annually for the security updates. Where I’ve seen Meraki before it was MX65, MX68 and MX75 depending on size and complexity of the operation and they effectively give you the units for free or very little and you pay £500-ish per year for the Security and SD WAN option licence. And I believe thats £500 per unit so if you had 2, then £1000 per year in licences. It might sound like a lot but the sites where we installed that gear were very straightforward and the support from the Meraki team is exceptional. Don’t know how to configure your firewall? No problem, they just dial in and sort it out. Access point gone offline? Here’s an advanced RMA unit, no charge.

As for Unifi, If you get 2 UniFi UXGs or UDM Pro SE and set up VPN Magic between them, that should “just work” and then 4G/5G failover on WAN2.

 

[drew]

Thanks so much for the advice.

Assuming i can mix and match the Unifi devices between sites, also i can connect the UDM-Pro via 10gbe to my Netgear switch?

I want to open another site in 18 months so Unifi looks like the cost friendly solution.