MG PoE with HA MX

[CraigP]

Hi,

I have a site with 2 MX75 a cabled WAN link and an MG. The primary MX has the cabled WAN link, and the spare has the MG. When ever the spare MX is upgraded we have the issue of the MG rebooting as PoE is also supplied from this device. This causes the spare MX to be stuck in a loop where it reloads with the new firmware, cannot connect to the cloud and then reverts back to the original version. It then tries to upgrade again....

The obvious answer is to have power supplied from another source. We have PoE switches in the same rack along with the primary MX. Can the WAN port on the primary supply PoE, or would it be better to connect to a switchport and put that in an unused VLAN?

Thanks

Craig

[RWelch]

Perhaps not the most ideal suggestion but could you temporarily move the primary MX WAN uplink to the spare MX WAN uplink just long enough to update the spare MX firmware?  If I understand your explination, the primary MX is using a cabled ISP whereas the secondary MX is using the MG?  Is that correct?

[CraigP]

Yes, that's correct.

As we do not have any technical people at the site, I am looking at a more long term solution where I don't need to send someone to site for each upgrade. We may also be deploying a similar setup to other sites, so this is something of a design consideration.

[RWelch]

I’m using AC adapters (sold separately) for two MGs.

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

What I would do (and have done in the past), is on the primary MX create a new VLAN and assign a LAN port to it.

Plug the second WAN port on the spare MX into it.  Then it can fail over to the cable connection.

[cmr]

Alternately have the wired WAN going to both MXs (if you can have a /29 for the public IPs) via an unmanaged L2 switch.

[cmr]

I'm pretty sure that all MGs from 41 onwards support being PoE powered from both ports, so if you connect the MG to both MXs then that would also work.

[RaphaelL]

https://documentation.meraki.com/MG/MG_Best_Practices/MG_Cellular_Best_Practices is a good document that covers what cmr and Phil a refering to.

I'm wondering if the diagrams were made by Ryan ?