Converting Cisco IOS XE to Meraki's Code Injected IOS XE with Cisco Cloud DNA

[TOCNY]

While working on a ticket today regarding some Catalyst switches in monitor mode I was reminded that if your switch shows a Cisco s/n and a Meraki s/n it means your device is capable of running Meraki's modified version of Cisco's IOS XE software.

It requires you to convert your exiting Cisco DNA license to Meraki's MS Cloud license and then affords you full management over your Catalyst device.

From what I understand it's a huge improvement as the newer version of the IOS XE is feature rich and the only downside I can see is us old time Cisco cmdline guys will have to live in a GUI only environment.

Has anyone had experience migrating their DNA licenses and the IOS XE image and now fully manages their Catalyst devices in Meraki's console?

[alemabrahao]

Here you can find all the prerequisites and the steps.

Getting started: Cisco Catalyst 9300 Management with Meraki Dashboard - Cisco Meraki Documentation

[alemabrahao]

And remember, some non-Meraki features are limited compared to what traditional Cisco offers, so it would be good to evaluate whether what Meraki offers will suit you.

[TOCNY]

Yeah that is always a good plan.  I have a 9300-48U stack in my lab that I am going to try this out on.  I sent in the request yesterday to Cisco that allows me to convert the Cisco DNA license over to Meraki's MS cloud license and then I was going to test the modified IOS XE version on this stack and compare features both good and bad before we decide.

We are planning our 5 year refresh this year and I am going to engage Meraki on the refresh as they now have aggregate models comparible to the Nexus platform which is what we use for our backbone.  5 Years ago they didn't really have the aggregate uplink capabilities that Nexus did so we went with all Cisco.  The new generation of engineers I work with seem to like a GUI as they probably have less console experience so I believe with Cisco and Meraki are closer to being one company now than every before we're going to be moving in that direction with them.  As a matter of fact the new high end aggregate backbone switches Meraki offer's have the Cisco logo on them.