Basic Question number of endpoints

[HanzeUniversity]

Goodmorning.

I have a very basic, very simple question. At the moment 2 of our branches have a Meraki solution with 5 and 6 AP's.

On our other branches we use 3 WLC's with close to a 1000 AP's. A colleague of mine said that we cant use Meraki for these branches since Meraki is simply to small to support a 1000+ AP's. we have by the way, 25.000 students and 3000 employees. Our SSID is eduroam. We have a b-class range we can use for WIFI. In my opinion it is possible if we appoint to each branch a different ip range. For instance 10.1.1.0 for building A, 10.1.2.0 for building B and so on.

Oh, the students must have roaming available since they can walk through the buildings and must keep the connection.

Am i right in this ?

Regards

erik

[MarcP]

As far as I know, there shouldn´t be any problem.

While using VLAN Tagging the Merakis all should be fine. You will need a Radius server as well and define the scope of IP Range in your DHCP Server for the VLAN

Will e nearly the same setup as you have right now on your WLC where you are using  different VLANs as well (thats what we do), and configure this vlan on your SSID/s. 

DHCP will still be done by your DHCP Server, not by meraki

[HanzeUniversity]

Ok cool, thanks for the reply

[BrechtSchamp]

Should be no issue. Meraki is scalable. As long as your WAN link has the necessary throughput to spare for the out-of-band management connection to the cloud (it needs 1kbps per Meraki device). That's really not that much. And the cloud's performance scales easier than on a physical controller of course.

Meraki also has L3 roaming support if you need it. But for those numbers you might need an MX (or a pair of MX's for redundancy). You'll need at least MX250's for the amount of tunnels needed so make sure you size that well using the numbers found in the datasheet:

https://meraki.cisco.com/lib/pdf/meraki_datasheet_mx.pdf

L3 roaming is described here:

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Cisco_Meraki_Best_Practice_Design/...

And also check out this article about high-density wifi deployments:

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Cisco_Meraki_Best_Practice_Design/...

Also regarding the need for L3 roaming. Do you really need students to be able to walk between buildings and keep the connection. How many students will care that they lose a skype call when walking between buildings?

Also, for a large deployment like this, please reach out to your Meraki Partner or Meraki SE to get the design validated.

[PhilipDAth]

You can scale up to the first 25,000 Meraki devices yourself.  After that you have to get support involved, and engineering have to split it across more than one shard (or you have to split it yourself using more than one organisation).  This document covers it:

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Cisco_Meraki_Best_Practice_Design/...

But in short - you wont be having a problem.