Cisco WLC3502 with Meraki setup

[Tarmahmood1]

Hi,

We are inprocess of planning to setup Branch A office to meraki from Cisco. we have Cisco wlc 3502 in Branch A office and APs in Branch B are connected to it.

my question is will Cisco WLC3502 connected to MS120 will work same as it is working now(as shown in figure) or should i connect to Cisco 2960 switch and then 2960 switch is connected to MX appliance directly or to any other Meraki switch. My intention is that even if i want to change to Meraki setup the APs in Branch B still connects to WLC in branch A and works as it is?

Otherwise i have to make one of Air-AP WLC and connect all APs to it in Brach B office itself?

Thankyou.

[rhbirkelund · Accepted solution]

As long as you configure the ports on your MS120, in the same way as your 2690 switch (i.e. trunk/access port type, vlan, etc) I see no reason as to why it should'nt work. Assuming that all Layer 3 functionality is on the branch MX, the MS120 will only act in Layer 2.

Remember that Meraki is Cloud based, so all configuration of the MS120 switch will be done on the Meraki Dashboard, contrary to your Catalyst 2960 switch.

In regards to the CAPWAP tunnel from Branch A to Branch B, you might need to look into Forwarding ports udp/5246 and udp/5247 to the WLC, assuming you are routing the CAPWAP tunnel over the internet (which I wouldn't recommend). If you have a VPN tunnel between MX at Branch A and ISR4400 at Branch B, you should be ok.

[alemabrahao]

Yes WLC, does not support LACP, but you can use a backup port configuration. 😁

[Tarmahmood1]

@alemabrahao @GIdenJoe @KarstenI @rhbirkelund Thank you for your response. I will get back with outcome once it is implemented. hopefully end of feb-2023

[alemabrahao]

You can connect directly on MS120, It will work as expected. 

[KarstenI]

There is one thing that will not work:

If you now have a LAG between the 3504 and the 2960, this must be removed and configured for individual interfaces as the LAG implementation on the WLC and the MS switches is not compatible.

[GIdenJoe]

Or you could simply connect 1 interface so you don't hit the lag thing.

Then you don't have to touch the configuration on the WLC 😉