Cisco Catalyst 9300/9200 Hybrid mode

[Ratatui]

Onboarding Cisco Catalyst 9300 and 9200 switches.

Experience with 9300L-48P-4X-E model.

Facts:

1.Switch wasn't claimed in Meraki Dashboard>Organization Inventory

2.Switch was preconfigured

3.After fallowing steps for onboarding in hybrid mode, switch was claimed in inventory with Cloud ID (this one you can find in CLISH: by punching in following: show Meraki connect

4.Be patient with switch, it takes time for it to show as connected and "manageable" in Meraki Dashboard 

Cisco Meraki guide is straight forward and if you fallow step by step, included openings in firewall.

[Tony-Sydney-AU]

Hi @Ratatui ,

Thanks for sharing your experience.

That's exactly right. I'd like to add perspective as a Support Engineer.

In my experience in Meraki Network Support, individual C9300 can take between 15 and 25 minutes to pop up online in dashboard. Stacked C9300 can take longer.

The key to having the best onboarding experience is to be prepared. The following actions help not just in Hybrid mode, but also can they help in cloud native:

1. Make sure all trunk ports have your management VLAN allowed throughout your network and also make it the Native VLAN. We know that management VLAN doesn't need to be Native; but doing this is better for onboarding as this is the first VLAN that cloud connector will try to reach the cloud on.
2. Configure your switche's management IP and VLAN as Static using either Local Status Page or CLI. Doing this speeds up a little bit since you don't rely on or wait for a DHCP lease.
3. Ensure you have just one upstream cable and trunk port; i.e.: configure redundancies later after onboarding. Doing this saves you some time with STP convergence during boot.
4. [Cloud Native] Avoid using the NM8 module port as upstream until you have the latest stable firmware. Older cloud native firmware sometimes have problems using this module as upstream trunk. As a result, it does a number or retries; sometimes you got to reboot. 😞
5. [IOS XE] If your management VLAN ID is above 1000 or if your trunk Allowed VLAN list has above 1000, be sure to enable VLAN Database. Go to menu Organisation -> Early Access, Opt-in (enable) VLAN Database; next, edit your default VLAN Profile in a way that your C9300 isn't limited to 1-1000.

Hope this information is useful. Feel free to comment or post if you have further questions / concerns.