Hybrid - Meraki with Cisco APs

[ispywifi]

We have Cisco APs in the office, running on old Wireless LAN Controllers. We are building a new area in the office and checking if Meraki is a better option as we will swapping all office APs from Cisco to Meraki in one year.

Does anyone have any experience running this hybrid network? I understand roaming will be tricky while users are moving from one platform to another but we're planning to do one area at a time to keep the costs low.

[PhilipDAth]

Try and avoid the APs from one system being able to see APs from the other system, otherwise they will think an attack is happening.

[BrechtSchamp]

As Philip already mentioned, make sure your Air Marshal settings don't see the Cisco APs as a threat.

For that go to Wireless > Air Marshal.

Either allow all rogue APs or whitelist the Cisco SSIDs.

Should be able to make it work. But it's not ideal. As you already mentioned real roaming will not work. And what if someone calls with problems connecting to the network, you'll have to figure out which network they're talking about first.

From a RRM perspective what Philip said also makes sense, if you mix them too much it will mess with the RRM algorithm.

[MarcP]

We are using this hybrid solution. works normal, with vlan tagging. 

We use it as a test, users don´t know it, and no one ever said something so far (in use for about a year).