IPv6 @ Meraki

[Meraki-PM-Team]

We intend to use this community thread to provide ongoing updates on Meraki’s IPv6 journey and bring further transparency on the IPv6 status for Cisco Meraki products.  Firstly, we want to acknowledge the clear gap in supporting IPv6 across the Meraki portfolio and sincerely understand the frustration that’s been expressed by community members and our customers. 

Each Cisco Meraki product has a different set of IPv6 requirements and technical complexities.  IPv6 is not a single feature, but rather a suite of features and capabilities that need to be enabled as a journey; which, unfortunately, is not a quick undertaking especially since we need to solve for effective management of IPv6 functionality in addition to enabling IPv6 data plane capabilities. 

It is important to note that currently shipping Cisco Meraki hardware platforms are IPv6-capable. Our primary objective is to deliver IPv6 in a phased manner that is as simple and streamlined as possible to adopt, for our existing and future customers.  IPv6 is one of our strategic cross-product initiatives and this is backed by engineering resources we have aligned to it.

We do not have publicly-shareable specifics yet, however we are committed to providing ongoing updates on our progress on this thread as well as other communication channels.  Expect the next update by the end of September 2019.

Thank you for your continued partnership,

The Cisco Meraki team

[CarolineS]

This thread will be used for updates from the Meraki team, so we are limiting the replies here to just Meraki personnel. Hence the "lock" icon on the thread.

You can subscribe to email updates by selecting "Subscribe" from the "Options" menu at the top of this page:

Cheers!

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Hi Everyone,

As mentioned in our previous update, we are committed to providing ongoing updates regarding the efforts and progress around IPv6 at Cisco Meraki. While we have no additional product roadmap updates to communicate at this time, we would like to share with the community that Meraki continues to accelerate our IPv6 investments and grow our engineering team to include top IPv6 talent. We recently brought on board a group of engineers comprised of leading experts who have IPv6 design and implementation expertise, coupled with practical and operational experience. This core team joined from Cisco’s Paris Innovation and Research Lab alongside Mark Townsley, a Cisco Fellow with many years of experience tackling IPv4 exhaustion challenges, developing IPv6 transition technologies, a leader and major advocate for IPv6 deployments across the industry. 

Continuing our mission of simplifying powerful technologies, our aim with IPv6 is to not only provide basic functionality, but to solve key challenges that are preventing wider adoption of IPv6 in the enterprise by making IPv6 truly “Meraki simple”. To this end, we have been engaging with customers and gaining additional insights into wishes, expectations, and aspirations for the Meraki IPv6 implementation.

We will continue to use this community thread as the vehicle of communication of our IPv6 progress. Expect the next update to come in the first half of December 2019.

Thank you,

The Cisco Meraki Team

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Greetings all,

In the last update, we mentioned the addition of leading IPv6 experts to the Meraki team in order to help with development and rollout of IPv6. We have made progress since then, and want to use this update to share some of this with the community. 

No product at Meraki is complete without our Dashboard and the Cloud that supports it. Over the past few months, we have been diligently enabling IPv6 across our entire Global Cloud Infrastructure, taking care not to disrupt service for a single customer while doing so. At the time of this post, we are over the halfway mark, with more than 50% of all of our Cloud ready to use IPv6. Our next step will be to add AAAA records to Meraki domain names, including the “front door” - dashboard.meraki.com. Sometime after the holiday break and before our next update, you should see AAAA records appear, disappear, and (assuming all went well) reappear permanently similar to how major websites around the world did for the World IPv6 Day. 

We are not enabling IPv6 on our cloud only for the Dashboard web service though, we are also preparing for managing Meraki devices over IPv6. Assuming the rollout continues to go as well as it has, we will begin using IPv6 for our management traffic to the Meraki cloud as well. We will do this very carefully, working initially with customers that already have IPv6 on their MR and MS platforms before moving to the rest of the Meraki product line. 

Why this initial focus on our own infrastructure? Simple. We believe it is important for us to have hands-on experience with IPv6 across the entire Meraki organization. This way, as we incorporate IPv6 into our platform as well as our products, we will be  better positioned to provide the best experience possible for Meraki customers. To do that, we need to eat our own dogfood by using IPv6 not only for our day-to-day work and product development, but within our most critical infrastructure as well. 

As we continue to make progress across our infrastructure and products, we will continue to update the community here.  Please expect the next update in February 2020 (and keep on the lookout for our AAAAs!).

Thank you,

The Cisco Meraki Team

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Greetings all,

During our last update, we reported that we were in the process of enabling IPv6 in our Cloud and that we would soon begin advertising IPv6 reachability for dashboard.meraki.com. In late January, we orchestrated our own mini IPv6 Day by enabling and disabling an IPv6 AAAA record in the global Domain Name System. As expected, we witnessed a number of our customers using IPv6 to reach the Meraki Dashboard. Since then we went through another iteration of enabling and disabling AAAA as we continued to roll out and test IPv6 across our infrastructure and applications.

We also reported in our last update that we were about 50% finished with the upgrade to IPv6 in our Cloud in order to support dashboard.meraki.com permanently. We are pleased to mention that this IPv6 deployment is now 100% complete and AAAA records for dashboard.meraki.com should remain indefinitely. We are progressing on IPv6 for our other services as well, one domain name you can check out with IPv6 today is icmp.canireachthe.net which is used by our devices and live tools.

This is still the beginning of our journey and there is still quite a bit more work to be done in order to support IPv6 across all Meraki products and services. Our goal is for all of our Cloud services to be available over IPv6 in preparation for management of devices that are connected via IPv6-only rather than dual-stack. In parallel to our infrastructure work, we are developing IPv6 functionality in our products and are very excited to start making some of this functionality available to the community for beta testing over the coming months. Our next update will be in April, and if things go according to plan, we should have some exciting news to report.

Thank you for your continued patience and partnership on this journey!

The Cisco Meraki Team

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Hi All,

We know that VPN connectivity is of utmost importance to our customers right now and those of you with dual-stack connectivity at your home or wherever you are working from right now would prefer to use IPv6 as much as possible and that the MX is still a barrier to that.  Also, as many of you know, a number of mobile carriers around the world have moved to IPv6-only service with IPv4 provided via a NAT64 function. If our Client VPN solution does not work through the ISP’s NAT64 translator, it is not only a barrier to using IPv6, it is a barrier to the VPN service itself if the client has no IPv4 to call back to.  As such, we have prioritized testing of our latest Client VPN implementation on the MX, and happy to report that it works on IPv6-Only mobile networks including T-Mobile in the US, EE in the UK and Rogers in Canada. Not all NAT64’s are the same and we haven’t had a chance to test with every combination of mobile client and ISP, but we hope that the successful results of these few ISPs indicate that it will work in other IPv6 plus NAT64 combinations.

If you already opt-in for beta features on the MX today, you should either already have or automatically get this new capability without any additional configuration.  If you have not been part of our beta features program and would like to join, please follow the instructions in the Managing Firmware Upgrades KB.  Remember to select MX 15.27 or the latest available beta code version of MX 15. While our aim remains full IPv6 support on the MX, NAT64 still has to work well.  We hope providing this will help in the near-term while we continue our journey towards IPv6.  

Thank you!

The Cisco Meraki Team

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Greetings all,

Last February, we reported that if everything went according to plans we’d have some exciting news to share by April. Sadly, things didn’t go as planned for most of the world since then, including us.  In light of the dramatic rise in remote working, we have had to shift some of our focus, in particular to support the rapid increase in VPN use by our customers. This included Client VPN Usability Improvements as well as our report last month in this forum regarding IPv6-only/NAT64 VPN Client support.

Regarding IPv6 across Meraki, the teams are still working diligently while sheltering in place. Progress continues, but we did experience some setback in terms of where we expected to be this month. For example, if you are running our latest beta firmware, you may have noticed some additional support on some of our MS platforms in terms of configurability between SLAAC and Static IPv6 addresses on the Local Status Page. Our cloud continues to roll out IPv6, and AAAAs on dashboard.meraki.com remain in place and are in active use, measurably increased as more people are working from home where IPv6 is generally more available.

Despite this setback, we remain committed as ever to IPv6 across the Meraki platform, and will continue to make progress in the months ahead. We expect our next update to be in June, but will post earlier as we did last month if we have any surprise info to share.

Stay safe and healthy,

The Cisco Meraki Team (from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Greetings all,

We would like to begin by thanking everyone for their help with testing our IPv6-only Client VPN capability with various ISP NAT64 implementations in response to our community post last April. We have one combination of Client+NAT64 that we are still investigating a potential issue with, but the vast majority of tests were successful right off the bat. Many thanks for signing up to help out, the development and test teams were very appreciative!

Since our last update, we continue to get back on track and make progress on IPv6 across the entire Cisco Meraki portfolio. In this post, we would like to highlight that we have launched a special IPv6 Beta release for MR which includes brand new functionality in management, firewall, client visibility, live tools, and more.  

At this time, we are limiting the IPv6 Beta to a select set of customers we have been working closely with on IPv6 and will be incorporating their valuable feedback accordingly. Next step is expanding the IPv6 Beta to a wider set of customers to get additional feedback, including those of you within the community that are willing and able to participate. The Beta process is a very valuable step in our journey, allowing us to iterate and innovate together as we bring IPv6 to Meraki.

We expect our next official update to be in August. In the meantime, keep an eye out for an IPv6 Beta invitation form here as well.

Stay safe and healthy,

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Hi everyone,

In our last update, we mentioned starting an IPv6 Beta for our MR APs with a limited set of customers.  We also said that we would be looking to expand the beta and offer an invitation to this community.  That time has come and we are excited to extend an invitation to you, our community members, to sign up for participation in this extended private beta. Your voice is incredibly important, and participating at this stage will allow us to make adjustments so that when IPv6 is released to all of our customers it is a huge success for all. 

So, if you have IPv6 available on your MR uplink and would like to participate in testing and providing feedback, please complete this request form. 

Over the coming weeks, we will be selecting participants and inviting each to a private forum where we can collaborate together on questions, feedback, bug reports, etc. 

Note that while we would love to include everyone from this community who wishes to participate, depending on the number of responses we receive, we may have to limit the number of participants. Please do not let this discourage you from completing the form though! We are eager to include as many of you as we possibly can, and greatly appreciate the time and effort you are willing to spend with us.

Thank you all in advance, we are looking forward to working with you as we bring IPv6 to Meraki.

Stay safe and healthy,

The Cisco Meraki Team

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Greetings all,

Since our last update, we have continued our development of IPv6 across the entire Cisco Meraki portfolio. In this post, we would like to highlight that we have been enabling AAAA DNS records for all URLs across our entire Dashboard, including all subpages and redirects from dashboard.meraki.com. As expected, we see a significant uptick in IPv6 traffic served by our cloud, and have been monitoring usage accordingly.  At the time of this writing we are about 40% complete and expect to reach 100% by the end of October if all continues as expected.  This marks an important milestone in our IPv6 journey, ensuring that our Dashboard web interface as well as Meraki device management traffic can be served 100% by IPv4 or IPv6 from our Cloud.

Earlier this month, we extended an invitation to this community to apply to participate in a private IPv6 Beta for our MR product line.  We have begun responding to these applications, and we are pleased to see that some of you are already heavily involved and providing great feedback.  We would like to take a moment to thank those of you who have already signed up and encourage those of you that have not yet signed up to do so via this request form.  Your feedback is greatly appreciated and key to ensuring we deliver IPv6 in a manner that is meaningful for our customers.

Here is a small taste of what the new firewall configuration is shaping up to look like:

We expect our next official update to be in October. In the meantime, stay safe and healthy.

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Hi Everyone,

In our last update, we mentioned our Global Cloud was about 40% IPv6 complete and that we expected to reach 100% by the end of October if things continued to progress well.  As of now, we are happy to say that our Global Cloud (dashboard.meraki.com) is now 100% supporting IPv6 natively.  This means our customers can now fully reach our Dashboard web interface over IPv6 without needing to go through translation gateways and ultimately enjoy a better experience.  This also sets the foundation needed for our products to be able to communicate with the cloud and to be managed over IPv6, which is critical as we continue our product development across the portfolio.

A perfect example of this is our MR in Private IPv6 Beta which we have been running for several months now.  In this Beta, the MR now supports full communication and cloud management over IPv6 natively, L3 Firewall rules, and a variety of other IPv6 functionality to help secure access, monitor, and troubleshoot in Dual-Stack or IPv6-Only environments. The Beta is going well and no major issues have been encountered to date, but we will continue to iterate and improve before it is released publicly to all customers.

As we continue the Beta going forward, we would like to encourage more of you to sign up and participate via this request form.  As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated and the key to ensuring we deliver IPv6 in a manner that is meaningful for our customers.

We expect our next official update to be in January. In the meantime, stay safe and healthy.

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Hi Everyone,

Starting off we want to take a moment to thank everyone that has been and continues to be part of our MR IPv6 Closed Beta.  The feedback has been extremely valuable in continuing to improve IPv6 in our MR products. We are planning on releasing the new MR IPv6 features that have been in the closed beta to all customers as part of our next major release, R28, due out later this year.

We hear the community and customer feedback around IPv6 support being needed on our MX portfolio and we take this extremely seriously.  We understand this has been an ask for a long time and many of you are frustrated.  Our plan for MX will be similar to MR, asking our customers and community to participate in an MX IPv6 Closed Beta before releasing to the public at large. Look out for an invitation to participate, even before our next official update.

Thank you for your continued support and sticking with us on this journey.

We expect our next official update to be in April. In the meantime, stay safe and healthy.

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Hi Everyone,

As promised, we are back with our April update! We are really excited about this one as it represents a major milestone in our IPv6 Journey: We are pleased to announce that we have begun a Private beta of IPv6 for our MX product family.  This Closed beta is currently focused on initial Dual-Stack connectivity, delivering IPv6 support alongside IPv4 for the MX WAN and LAN, including and a whole host of Dashboard updates to support it.

As always, we want to deliver an IPv6 experience that will delight our customers once we release the functionality to everyone.  For this, we need your help providing us with important feedback throughout our Product Development journey.  During the Closed beta, our goals are to introduce additional functionality and obtain valuable comments and insights from our customers.  If you are interested in participating in the MX IPv6 Closed beta, please use this sign-up form.

We will do our best to onboard as many of you as possible into the beta program, but please be patient if you do not receive an invite right away.  Rest assured, our team is very excited to work with as many customers as possible and to improve our products to serve your needs.

We expect our next official update to be in July.  In the meantime, stay safe and healthy.

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Hi Everyone,

We are really excited about all the work the teams have been doing for IPv6!  Since our last update, we released IPv6 in Public Beta for our MR product line. Beginning with firmware version MR 28.1 or higher, anyone who signs up for our public beta features will get IPv6, including a whole pile of new functionality such as Management over IPv6, L3 IPv6 ACL firewall support, RADIUS over IPv6, and more.  For a full list of supported functionality on MRs, please check out the IPv6 Support on MR Access Points knowledge base article.  Moving from Private to Public beta marks an important milestone as our first product to publicly support so much new functionality in IPv6, and we expect adoption to continue to rise as this update rolls out. 

The MX team has also been very hard at work since launching its Private Beta in March, adding new features while responding to feedback from our customers.  If you have not signed up for the Private Beta and would like to test IPv6 on your MX, please do so via the MX Closed Beta Sign-up Form.

We have also continued to improve IPv6 in our Cloud, and with the introduction of new regional API proxy infrastructure, the team naturally included IPv4 and IPv6.  Now, all customers can leverage the power of our platform via APIs over IPv6.

dig api.meraki.com aaaa +short => 2620:12f:c002:531:f816:3eff:fec7:ed37

NOTE: Output omitted and results will vary based on region.

Last but not least, our Beta Community deserves a major shout out for being awesome!  You are all a very important and integral part of delivering the best possible product and we love the great feedback you are providing. We love hearing from you, so THANK YOU!

Thanks again for continuing on this journey with us and for all the support!  We expect our next official update to be in October.  In the meantime, stay safe and healthy.

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

Hi Everyone,

Since the last update in July, the teams have continued to remain busy building more IPv6 functionality with a dose of Meraki magic.  We are really excited for this update as it touches MR, MS and MX.  We’d like to start off with MR. The team has introduced RA and DHCP Guard (IPv4 & IPv6) support in Dashboard, as part of the IPv6 capabilities in the MR 28.x firmware; which already enables this functionality by default.  We are happy that this addition will now allow our customers to further control first hop security via Dashboard.

For a while now, the MS product line has had the capability to obtain an IPv6 address on the management interface, but you couldn’t really do anything with it.  Well, that’s about to change!  With the latest MS 15.x Beta firmware, you will now be able to manage your MS switches via IPv6.  The MS switches will be able to communicate with our Cloud Backend over IPv6 natively.  You will be able to access the local status page and configure a Static IPv6 address as well, if you so desire.  Additionally the team is introducing IPv6 Static routing on the MS390 platform.

Last, but not least, we are pleased to announce that starting with MX 17.x public beta firmware, we will be launching the first set of IPv6 functionality supported on the MX SD-WAN & Security appliance product line.  This IPv6 launch will be focused on connectivity allowing the MX to obtain IPv6 addresses on the WAN uplinks via a number of methods.  It will allow customers to provide IPv6 Internet connectivity to their clients on the LAN through an MX by leveraging DHCPv6-PD from the ISPs or Static prefix configurations if so desired.  This first introduction will also allow accessing IPv6 resources across the MXs AutoVPN between sites.  In addition, it includes support for stateful firewall and the ability to configure L3 IPv6 firewall rules to ensure networks are properly secured.  There is a long list of functionalities that are being introduced on the MX, which will be made available via  public IPv6 KB at launch.  We are currently targeting making IPv6 available in public beta in the second half of November.

As always, we’d like to once again send a shout out to our Closed Beta testers since we would not be where we are today without them.  Thank you for helping us continue to make our products better for you and everyone of our customers!

Thanks again for continuing on this journey with us and for all the support!  We expect our next official update to be in January.  In the meantime, we will do another update once IPv6 has been launched on the MX. 

Stay safe and healthy!

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

In order to provide the best experience possible with IPv6, we will be targeting January to introduce support on the MX Security appliances. Please stay tuned for our update in January.

Have safe and happy holiday season!

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

 Happy New Year everyone!

As you all know we have been on a Journey to deliver and support IPv6 functionality for our customers for quite some time.  We are extremely excited to announce the Introduction of IPv6 (Dual Stack) support on the MX Security and SD-WAN platforms!

With this introduction there are a variety of supported functionality such as WAN, LAN, Routing, AutoVPN, Firewalls and Monitoring and Reporting.  Please have a look at the official announcement here and review the IPv6 Support on MX Security & SD-WAN Platforms KB article for more information on all the functionality being added.

This is the starting result of a lot of work by many different teams and we are extremely grateful for all of your support and patience throughout this Journey.  As such we want to send a special thank you to all (Cisco Meraki Internal teams, Beta testers and customers) that have helped us accomplish this fantastic milestone and please know that we could not have done this without you.

Our next community update is expected to be in April.  In the meantime, continue to stay safe and healthy!

The Cisco Meraki Team (still from ::1)

[Meraki-PM-Team]

 Hello everyone!

Earlier this year we announced the official support of IPv6 on our MX platforms here, including the functionality listed in the IPv6 Support on MX Security & SD-WAN Platforms KB article.  Since this initial release, our teams have been focused on finding and fixing bugs while building out new capabilities such as these which were recently added to our Closed Beta:

MX

• Dynamic VLAN Firewall support (IPv4 and IPv6)
• New Routing Table view 
• Link-Local (LLA)  & Solicited Node Multicast (SNMC) visibility on LAN

MR

• Client Isolation (IPv4 & IPv6) support
• IPv6 Bonjour Forwarding
• DAD detection and failover

MS

• Support for management over IPv6 with latest MS 15.x firmware

If you would like access to these new capabilities before they are available to the public later this year, please sign up for the beta below:

• MX IPv6 Closed Beta (Sign up here)
• MR IPv6 Closed Beta (Sign up here).

In an earlier post, we had mentioned that Mark Townsley had joined the team to help deliver IPv6 to our customers.  Cisco Meraki’s IPv6 leaders Mark Townley, Jeffry Handal and Raul Ricano will be at Cisco Live US next month.  The team will be hosting two breakout sessions to learn more about our IPv6 implementation. In addition, there will be an interactive breakout that will allow attendees to ask any design or implementation questions from the team.  If you are planning to be at Cisco Live, please feel free to sign up and join us for the following sessions.

Session Type: Breakout

Session ID: BRKIPV-1752

Session Title: Experience the Journey to IPv6-Only With Cisco Meraki

Date: 06/14/22

Start Time: 1:00 PM - 1:45 PM

Session Type: Breakout

Session ID: BRKIPV-2751

Session Title: Cisco Routing Meraki Access with IPv6 (CRMAv6) - A Practical Guide

Date: 06/15/22

Start Time: 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM

Session Type: Interactive Breakout

Session ID: IBOIPV-2001

Session Title: Let's discuss the IPv6 implementation of Meraki

Date: 06/15/22

Start Time: 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

We look forward to seeing some of you in person at Cisco Live and welcoming more customers into our Closed Beta communities.

Our next community update is expected to be in August.  In the meantime, stay safe and healthy!

The Cisco Meraki Team (slowly climbing out of ::1)