We're looking at Meraki for school campus, it's a bit remote so Meraki would be ideal because of the cloud management we wouldn't need to have an IT guy on site. I wanted some opinions from others on using Meraki gear in this scenario. Background on what we're doing. There are 3 buildings on the campus, all interconnected with fiber that dead ends at a single DC in one of the buildings. Buildings have cisco VOIP phones as well as video cameras for wired devices. Each building has about 30 UBNT APs (not in budget to replace right now). All clients (about 1200 total between all buildings) use primarily 5ghz wireless. DC has 1GB fiber internet connection and 250mb failover, a few ESXI servers, a Synology (doing surveillance stuff) and a few misc other servers. That said the main thing I'm wondering (see my buildout below) where would it be best to locate layer 3 and DHCP? Should I do it on the MX250 HA pair or should I do it on the aggregation switches (because everything plugging into them, other switches, esxi servers, synology) Or do I do a mix of things, dhcp on MX with layer 3 on the MS425 switches. Also the other factor being processing power of the device, not sure who's guts are newer, the MX or the MS switches. That's my primary question which ties into this one regarding LACP and virtual switch stacking. I know the MS425 can be virtually stacked and supports LACP. So how does that work for moving data around, do you use the 40GB ports as an uplink between switches? Do they somehow pump that data around between the LACP connection to the outside switch stacks? I need failover here because of the remoteness of the location, but unsure how exactly "virtual Stacking" works. That aside, if you have a pair of MS425 in a virtual stack, how would I uplink that to my MX? For instance, an uplink cable running from switch 1 to mx 1, and switch 1 to mx 2, then a cable running from switch 2 to mx1 and switch 2 to mx2. Is this going to cause a loop or would I have a 20GB uplink because it's coming from two virtually stacked switches? I drew a simplified model of this at the bottom to help better illustrate what I'm thinking. Any thoughts or experience with Meraki in a similar situation is GREATLY appreciated. Buildout: MX250 X 2 in HA Pair Dual 10GB Fiber Uplink from each mx to each MS Switches MS425 16p Aggregation Switch x 2 in Virtual Stack 10GB Fiber links (two each) to each Server and Synology using LACP 10GB Fiber links (4 total, 2 to each building switch stack) using LACP Building 1 Meraki MS225-48FP x 3 switches with RPS2300 Dual 10GB LCAP link back to MS425 stack, one link to each switch Building 2 Meraki MS225-48FP x 3 switches with RPS2300 Dual 10GB LCAP link back to MS425 stack, one link to each switch
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