Apply Interface to MS210 L2 Switch

[Priesty]

Under what circumstance would you apply an interface to a Layer 2 MS210 switch under (Routing and DHCP) considering the MS350 switch sitting above it would handle all the inter-VLAN routing.

Would you do this for switch management access on a dedicated management VLAN (native). We have multiple MS210s uplink to a MS350 via trunk port, yet I can't get my head around why I could then create a interface on the MS210?

[PhilipDAth]

The first thing to note is the management IP on an MS is not the same as what is used for any routed VLAN interfaces.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Layer_3_Switching/MS_Layer_3_Switching_and_Routing#Notes_regardi... 

The management IP (which is used for talking to the cloud) can be configured to use any VLAN you want.  You don't have to configure a layer 3 interface on the switch.

You can configure the default management VLAN for all your switches under Switch/Switch Settings.

You can also configure the management VLAN to use for an individual switch via the local status page.

[Priesty]

Ok thanks, but other than having a management interface, is there any other reason you would create an interface on a ms210 switch?

[PhilipDAth]

Any interfaces you create - can not be a management interface.

[cmr]

@Priesty you can use ms210 switches as a L3 core with an MX (or server etc.) as the DHCP server.  You can even stack them and use @PhilipDAth 's "favourite" rps2300 as a secondary power solution for a pretty highly available core.  If you need 10GbE then use the ms225s or mix them both up.

That's why you can create interfaces 😎

[Priesty]

MS210 as a L3 core? its a L2 switch?

[cmr]

It does have static L3 routing and interfaces to facilitate that:

Also vrrp, though we aren't planning to use that as it'll be a stack.

[Priesty]

rrr think you just answered my question, so it cant do inter-vlan routing, but you can force it to route a vlan out to a specific address. if we arnt using static routing and trunking everything up to the core l3, then we do not need to create any interfaces on the ms210

[cmr]

@Priesty the ms210 can do inter-vlan routing, it just can't do that many, do dynamic routing or be a dhcp server.  Please see this article:

https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Layer_3_Switching/MS_Layer_3_Switching_and_Routing

[Priesty]

so confusing considering on the meraki site they advertise the ms210 as a L2 switch

[cmr]

I know, I only chanced upon it when I accidentally enabled L3 routing on one of our ms225/210 stacks that we were setting up purely for L2 edge use!  Our testing so far has confirmed that the inter-vlan routing does work, though we haven't yet evaluated the inter-vlan routing performance.

[Priesty]

frustrating. i did just try to enable dhcp server on the ms210 and it did say that the device does not support dhcp server, only relay

[cmr]

Indeed, you need to use either a server, Windows or Linux etc. include one, or another network device such as an MX.  The latter is the route we are planning to take and we have set up the relay settings to point to the MXs IP.