MX Recommended Clients

[NickSpeechley]

Hey Community

We have a client thats looking for a Meraki solution and has advised us that there are up to 100 network devices at this one site. The WAN bandwidth will be 100/40.

Judging from the MX data sheet it mentions the MX67 + MX 68 (two basic models we use) recommended clients is 50 whereas the MX84 is 200. Is the Recommended Client a hard limit? How do I judge this recommendation as the MX84 looks to be overkill for what they need based on the max WAN bandwidth available.

MX Data Sheet page 7 + 8 - https://microage.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/meraki-MX-firewall-data-sheet.pdf

[DarrenOC · Accepted solution]

Hi @NickSpeechley , the MX datasheet specifications are there as a guideline.  You could possibly deploy the smaller MX and be ok. On the other hand you may suffer performance issues because of the higher client count. I always go higher than what’s required as I’m also allowing for any growth.

[MerakiDave]

Hi @NickSpeechley agree with @DarrenOC that I'd go right to the MX84 in this case for 100M/40M with 100 clients.  No, client count is not a hard limit, but a guideline on what was methodically stress tested with all features enabled and still had solid performance.  Depending on what features you'll be running, you might be fine running more clients than what is specified in the data sheet, but we'd never recommend undersizing an appliance for an initial deployment, since some of the key factors for MX sizing are bandwidth, client count, and tunnel count if doing VPN.  

[nealgs]

We had a similar dilemma a couple of years or so ago when we began our migration to Meraki kit (so glad we did)

11 sites through-out europe ranging in size from 100 people to around 5 - plus host system at a data centre.

ended up with 2 MX84's for sites with 70 + users and rest went with MX64 and one Mx65 for site that was going to have dual circuits (but didn't in the end - doh! )

It's best to go have to much than not enough as you end up buying twice otherwise.