Licensing clarification

[SheaBYU]

I have a customer with a renewal coming due this month.  The Meraki rep is incentivizing the customer with a 5 year for the price of 3 promo.  However, some of the devices will be end of support before the 5 years is up.  Will the customer lose the remaining license time of those devices if they upgrade them mid license term?  Or, do they go into a general "time" bucket?  The customer is on a co-term licensing model.

[Ryan_Miles]

What type of devices are these? Some licenses are generic to the product family like APs, Cameras, and Sensors. So, they're reusable when equipment is upgraded. 

Other devices like Security Appliances, Switches, and Cellular Gateway licenses are model specific and in most cases cannot be reused/moved to a different model.

[SheaBYU]

They are MX security appliances.  They have one MX400 that will be end of support next may, but want to take advantage of the 5 year pricing.  Sounds like it is best to upgrade that first.

[Ryan_Miles]

Yeah I would not buy a MX400 license at this point and rather focus on replacing that with a modern device  & license.

[cmr]

Support can credit the remaining MX400 life when you retire it and you can then use that for the new MX.  I've done this before with an MX65 to MX68 swap.

[Ryan_Miles]

I'd double check that with your Meraki account team. While their are some supported conversions it's limited to lower end models ≤ MX100.

[PhilipDAth]

MX65 to MX68 is one thing. I would not count on doing the same with an MX400.

However they could try asking the account team for a Deal ID to recognise the unused portion of the licence as a discount against a new device/licence puchase.

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

The first thing to note is those two extra years are "free".  So the customer will not miss out on anything in years 4 and 5.

Personally, I would replace the MX400 now.

Another option you could consider is using subscription licence instead of co-term licencing.  This allows you to use the same licence on a new box in the same family.  I'm starting to lean into subscription licenceing for larger customers because it makes doing hardware upgrades like this SO much easier.

https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Licensing/Meraki_MX_Subscription_Licensing

For example, if you licence an MX400 under a subscription licence, you could then swap out the MX400 for any of these devices with no impact:

• MX90-HW
• MX95-HW
• MX100-HW
• MX105-HW
• MX400-HW
• VMX100
• vMX-L