Suggestion for Meraki Template for existing network

[SVAN]

Hi Meraki community,

I am new here. Our company just on-board new customer with Meraki devices with about ~160 networks with MX only (at this stage).

However, Meraki is setup without any template. And anytime, you want to make change to the network, you have to go through single network and make changes (Or Meraki API).

My question is : is there any way to setup the Template and bind the existing network into this template without any outage. IP subnet/VLAN must stay the same way as it is at the moment. 

Please let me know what you guys think.

[MarcP]

I don´t think this is possible...
If yes, it has to be safe, that existing IP settings are not overritten...

Have got the same problem, would be nice to know if it is possible.

[BrechtSchamp]

I assume you will be using subnets from IP pools in your templates? In that case applying a template will be re-IP'd. With templates you have no control over which subnet from a pool is chosen.

Imo you should bite the bullet and foresee some downtime.

To test you could create a copy of your network, and apply the template to it. That way you'll see what happens to it.

[SVAN]

Hi BrechtSchamp,

Yes, basically we have to go with the same IP address scheme for the existing sites. The company used to migrate the existing sites from Cisco routers to Meraki. 

If there is no way to assign the exact subnet for the networks that I want from the template, then there is no point for templates.

The next question would be:

- If not using template, would it be other better way to make change to the networks in the whole organisation ?

[MarcP]

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@SVAN wrote:

If there is no way to assign the exact subnet for the networks that I want from the template, then there is no point for templates.

The next question would be:

- If not using template, would it be other better way to make change to the networks in the whole organisation ?

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As mentioned first, I don´t think this will be possible. For both of your comments.

[PhilipDAth]

The others are correct in that when you bind the network to a template it will reset its IP.  However you can go back in and re-assign the existing subnet.  It will cause an outage.

I have done this many times when converting non-template networks to template networks.