Meraki as CORE switch vs Regular managed switch

SOLVED
kYutobi
Kind of a big deal

Meraki as CORE switch vs Regular managed switch

Now I have heard from many people (not in the community) that they won't ever use Meraki as a core switch. What are your opinions?

Enthusiast
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
PhilipDAth
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

I tend to use either Cisco Nexus Switches, Cisco Catalyst switches, or Cisco Meraki switches.  It just depends.

 

If the DC is only used say 18 hours a day, and scheduling in outages for regular firmware upgrades is not an issue then I'll use Meraki.

 

If the environment needs VRF, or has complex routing requirements then it'll be a Cisco Nexus or Cisco Catalyst solution.  If the environment needs absolute 24x7 uptime then I'll probably head towards a Catalyst chassis solution with dual supervisors.

View solution in original post

5 REPLIES 5
ww
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

for a branch i think its fine. for a DC you probably want to tune routing, timers etc for compatibility, and you dont want updates and reboots often. 

BlakeRichardson
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

I think it really depends on the network and what you want / need to do. We run 2 x MS425-32 in a stack configuration, we dont however use the core switches for our layer 3 routing as I wasn't happy with the limitations that Meraki has around L3 routing.

 

 

PhilipDAth
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

I tend to use either Cisco Nexus Switches, Cisco Catalyst switches, or Cisco Meraki switches.  It just depends.

 

If the DC is only used say 18 hours a day, and scheduling in outages for regular firmware upgrades is not an issue then I'll use Meraki.

 

If the environment needs VRF, or has complex routing requirements then it'll be a Cisco Nexus or Cisco Catalyst solution.  If the environment needs absolute 24x7 uptime then I'll probably head towards a Catalyst chassis solution with dual supervisors.

I'm with @PhilipDAth on this. Couldn't have said it better.

Thank you all for your input. I really appreciate the considerations and factors. 

Enthusiast
Get notified when there are additional replies to this discussion.
Welcome to the Meraki Community!
To start contributing, simply sign in with your Cisco account. If you don't yet have a Cisco account, you can sign up.
Labels