Meraki Infrastructure Upgrade

[pharney103]

Looking for recommendations

My site has an existing infrastructure of MS320/420 switches and MR32/36 APs.

We recently purchased all new hardware but this will be my first upgrade. Can someone provide some information about preliminary work or how they have done an upgrade? Thank you.

[alemabrahao]

Here is some Best Practices.

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

But my advice is to do it in stages, update one network first, check if everything is ok and then update the others.

[PhilipDAth]

The APs will be relatively easy.  Just add them to the existing network.  Once the old APs have all been disconnected, you can removed them from your inventory.

Unfortunately, you will have to note the configuration of every port for the switches and then re-implement those settings on the new switches.

[Brash]

Above posts are spot on.

Only thing I'll add is that if you're configuring lots of switches, it's far easier to use the API.

If the new switch has the same number of ports, using the API you can simply pull the config of the old switch and apply it to the new switch.
If the new switch has a different number of ports (or you're changing the port mapping), you will need to create a new csv/json file and apply it using the API.

I wrote up a script a while ago to take a csv file of basic port config and push it to a given switch. Not the best coding but it works well enough - Brash92/Meraki (github.com)
If you have the skills, you can do something similar to push the required config to the new switches.

There's plenty of other (probably better) resources/references out there to speed up this kind of work with the API.