Has anyone made the move from being a traditional Cisco environment to Meraki? I'm just curious as to if anyone's done that here.
If I would add some advantages of migration to Meraki MS switch,
You would get the following advantages to reduce management / installation cost:
I have both hybrid environments (both) and full swap out.
As stated costs are only one factor. From the technical side you need to fully understand what you need as Meraki does have limitations over traditional Cisco gear. Sometimes you don't come across them until after the fact 😉
It really depends on what features you need.
We’re continually doing this for our customers. WLCs being swapped out for Meraki MR’s, no issues there. Just be careful when replacing the legacy switches if you find yourself with a combined network of both. Run a search for Meraki and Cisco switches and spanning-tree.
I would guestimate around 90% of our customers have migrated from Cisco Enterprise to substantially Cisco Meraki.
CIsco make both enterprise and small business hardware. I think most users would be able to migrate successfully, those that require features that Meraki don't support then obviously not.
In reality most users networks are pretty straight forward.
Your Cisco phones will continue to work so don’t worry there. We have Meraki edge switches in and working fine with Cisco, Yealink, Polycom etc
I'm in the middle of a long migration from my Cisco ASA's and Catalyst Switchgear and it's going very well! One really cool thing I just found out today in the ECMS2 (Engerning Cisco Meraki Solutions) class today. There is a script to import ASA configs to your MX. Really helps to streamline the process.
Meraki MX Converter - Import ASA config files and automatically adapt rules to the target MX. This script will parse through an existing ASA config and generate Meraki MX compatible FW rules. The script supports objects(network/service). It'll build iterative or multi-source/multi-destination L3 based rules. It'll then configure the target MX network with the ruleset mapping to the new interfaces."
https://github.com/wifiguru10/Meraki_MX_Converter
We've got several customers switched to Meraki from conventional Cisco.
One thing to keep in mind is iscsi storage traffic over meraki switches.
I would strongly advise not to use meraki for them but use catalyst or even nexus.
Besides buffering and latancies the problem is with updating the networks, you jst must sometime.
This wil result in a maintenance window (yes even though your network design is good, you dont want to take any risks)
Luckily this became a bit better with the staged updates.
In a conventional setup, those switches don't even have internet connection and are managed oob.
Just can't do that with meraki.
>One thing to keep in mind is iscsi storage traffic over meraki switches.
With storage you really should be using two switches, and one of those switches should not be in a stack with the primary switch (often you just put it on its own). The non-stacked switch goes to the secondary ports of everything using the storage. Put the second switch in a seperate Meraki network with a different maintenance window so it never reboots at the same time as the main switch(es).
Ideally the storage system will support using different subnets for the primary and second NICs. So in a perfect work you have a VLAN on the primary switch and another different VLAN on the secondary switch, and these VLANs do not leave their respective switches. Each of those VLANs has a unique subnet used for the storage primary and secondary NICs (as well as associated servers).
And you use MPIO to pull everything together.
This concept applies weather you are using FibreChannel or IP storage, and irrespective of all vendors.