What is the best practice?

TomasB
Here to help

What is the best practice?

Hi, what is the best practice in this scenario?

 

SD-WAN MX85 

 

Connect all 5 MS switches directly to the MX or just connect the first switch to the MX  and then link the other MS to the (first MS) that are connected to the MX?

 

3 Replies 3
KarstenI
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

I always prefer to connect a stack of two switches to the MX (or redundant MXes). And this stack connects all the other switches.

alemabrahao
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

Take a look at this document:

 

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Recommended_Topologies/MX_and_MS_B...

 

https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Deployment_Guides/MX_Warm_Spare_-_High_Availability_Pair#Fully_R...)

I am not a Cisco Meraki employee. My suggestions are based on documentation of Meraki best practices and day-to-day experience.

Please, if this post was useful, leave your kudos and mark it as solved.
GreenMan
Meraki Employee
Meraki Employee

If you have just a single MX, you have no onsite servers and all your SVIs (default gateways) are handled by the MX, then I'd say you were fine to link all your switches direct to the MX, reducing hop count etc - in such a setup, there would be no loops to resolve and no advantage from ASIC-powered routing (in a L3 switch).   If you are using warm spare (dual MXs) I'd definitely go with @KarstenI 's recommendation;   aggregate your switches to a stack of two switches, then put resilient links in as per the Recommended Topologies section of the warm spare document that @alemabrahao linked - and use Spanning Tree to resolve loops as needed and 're-open' blocked links when required upon failure.

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