MX Failover Options

Daniel
Here to help

MX Failover Options

What are fellow Meraki Administrators doing to provide High Availability/Redundancy for MX security appliances?  To be more clear, how do you plan for the worst if your MX decides to stop or a natural disaster happens?

3 REPLIES 3
MerakiDave
Meraki Employee
Meraki Employee

Daniel, depending on your deployment architecture/scenario, there are a couple of things to consider.  Check out some of the deployment guides https://documentation.meraki.com/MX-Z/Deployment_Guides such as Warm Spare, DC-DC Redundancy, and SD-WAN solutions if that applies to your specific architecture.  If you're simply referring to mitigating an MX failure in a single site, that's simply the Warm Spare (NAT HA) scenario for an active/passive design.  Along with other obvious things like having both MX units on separate and redundant UPS power, dual power supplies in the higher-end models, physical separation between the units as appropriate (like in different racks or rooms or buildings), and then you'd consider redundant ISP connections, cellular WAN backup, and SD-WAN scenarios, etc.  And if for whatever reason a 2nd MX for Warm Spare functionality isn't in the budget, consider a Z1 or Z3 along with a 4G cellular dongle, you could drop the Z appliance in place of a failed MX for emergency connectivity, and/or use the 4G USB dongle for ISP outages.  Neither might not be close to the same bandwidth/performance, but then again it's for emergency backup use.  I've used my own Z1 and 4G USB dongle together multiple times for on-the-fly connectivity, works great. 

We use the "Warm Spare" method for the majority of our customers.

Did anyone tried, Warm Spare with 4G backup. i am in a situation where when WAN1 on primary MX goes down, it kicks on the cellular interface + it failover to spare Meraki box. Is there a way to shut the cellular interface in this case. Since, i believe cellular kicks in to establish connectivity with dashboard but all traffic moves to secondary box.

Get notified when there are additional replies to this discussion.
Welcome to the Meraki Community!
To start contributing, simply sign in with your Cisco account. If you don't yet have a Cisco account, you can sign up.
Labels