Meraki Switch Stack Question - C9300-48T and Dashboard prestaging

[Pwellion]

Hi There

I have a client who will be provided with 3 Stacks of 3 x C9300-48T-M switches. (9 Switches in total).
There is a 2 week delay in the devices arriving. So far I have only claimed the devices in the dashboard and assigned to a network.

Based on Meraki documentation (Stacking Catalyst (MS390s / C9300-M / C9300X-M) below, it recommends to physically connect the stack with devices powered off, then provide an uplink from one switch to for internet access.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Stacking/Switch_Stacks

I was wondering what configuration I could pre-stage for instance I want to create SVIs, Routing, DHCP scopes etc, however when attempting to do this the dashboard I need to specify a switch stack, which I is not yet provisioned based on the recommendation

I was wondering if it's possible to manually provision stack for these models of switches, which should allow me to preconfigure the network. If anyone has any experience or advice it would be appreciated.

Thanks

[alemabrahao]

It is not possible to provision configurations without having the switch added to the dashboard. My personal recommendation is to configure it after having already made the stack configurations.

[Pwellion]

Thanks. The devices are added to the dashboard and assigned to a network (think I mentioned this in my post), however they are as individual standalone devices.

[alemabrahao · Accepted solution]

My suggestion continues to be to configure after performing the stack configurations.

[GIdenJoe]

In case of MS switches.  If you have already added the devices in the network you can manually select them and put them in a stack and then just uplink one device.
However with Catalyst switches I'm not sure this will work as easily.
I can understand if you want to configure routes and interfaces before bringing the devices online that this is a valid use case.

If however you don't need to configure much before then I would suggest just physically connecting the switches and bringing them online with one link.  The dashboard can now autoprovision the switchstacks for you.  You only need to change the name of the stack.