Some of the ones I deal with are still having issues. STP issues, stack management issues, general instability issues. Until 15 hits and has some "skin" on it, I would wait. I have a few people ready to bail on the 390's for Catalyst again because you can manage Catalyst switches with the Meraki Dashboard now. Some are discussing writing them off as losses. ... View more

Our experience has varied. I have one customer still having stability issues. Especially with large stacks. The issues aren't it dropping off the management console anymore, but more around L3 changes. Or in one case they had to RMA a stack member for hardware failure, and following Meraki tech support instructions to replace the RMA's unit, it blew up the whole stack. It was a stack with 6 members. In areas with smaller stacks of 2-3 390's they seem much more stable. I do know we were told the new 15 code would be out months and months ago, and that has yet to happen. It seems to be taking Cisco a lot longer to fix this than they thought it would. Not sure if it is becasue of continuing stability problems or what. They are pretty tight lipped. ... View more

We have a lot of these. And to be honest, they still have problems. I have a current customer still having problems. The promised fixes to the firmware fixed some issues, but not all. We have some folks using this who are not having problems though. But they are temperamental and you have to be careful what you do or you may destabilize them.   I would still categorize these switches as beta. But your mileage may vary.   If you are looking for rock solid get the older MS350's if you need the gui console. Or if you are well versed in IOS get the CAT 9000 replacements running IOS. That's my humble opinion.     ... View more

Yes. It does fix the dropping off the dashboard part. It has not however fixed the issue of layer 3 changes requiring switch reboots for routing to work correctly. ... View more

We heard that future hardware will all be the Cisco platform stuff. Not the old Broadcom based stuff Meraki used to use.But you make a good point. The EOL on the 390 on 9300 hardware may be EOL sooner. I am making assumptions based on the best information I have. ... View more

We have found once the switches are configured, if you don't make L3 changes, they are stable. The issue only affects the management plane. The data plane just keeps switching as it should and clients end users never notice anything. We also found that the problem crops up more on "busy" switches. I .E. ones with all the ports filled and in use, or very large stacks. becasue we want newly purchased hardware to have the longest possible service life, we decided to be patient. Going to 355's may bring stability in the management console now, but the switch lifespan will be shorter as it will be EOL before a MS390. As long as it is not impacting the customer clients, they are ok with it not appearing in the dashboard for a short time.. Obviously everyone else may have a different use case or different customers so you may choose a different path. In talking to the head of development , they are working nonstop on this and it has been given total priority over all else. As in new feature development has been halted until; these bugs are squashed for good. If they deliver on this, we will continue to use them. If it drags on for month son end or never happens obviously it may all get rethought by my management. ... View more

To some extent true. But the alternative is to trade them for MS-350 or 355. Both of which are aging switches in the product line. Meraki has also indicated they will not be developing on the broadcom platforms for new switches in the future. But on Cisco hardware going forward instead. Swap them for older switches at your own risk. They will be stable but they are old right out of the box. ... View more

I don't want to rain on the parade, but 15.9 will not fix the dashboard connectivity problems or the L3 changes making stacks unstable. It is our understanding after talking with development that these items are going to be fixed in a  forthcoming 14.x patch release in the very soon future. For the time being until we get this patch we have modified our deployments. We don;t let stacks get too big, and we don't deploy in an situation where an MS-390 is going to be constantly having L3 changes made (SVI's created and deleted) constantly. (example a hosting environment.) Meraki has given us assurances tha future firmware will not make these bugs reappear as they will not be allowing any updates out that cause them to reappear. They are very aware of how much of a black eye this has given them. ... View more

To be fair, they will be Meraki. They don't run catalyst but Meraki code ported to the Catalyst hardware ASICS. It makes sense for me for Cisco to do this. Frankly I think the Catalyst hardware is much more robust. It also makes sense they would only want their developers on one hardware platform. Even if they sell two different products to two different markets.   As an old hand, (who is just looking to eek out a living at this till I can retire) I can see the writing is on the wall for the old Catalyst CLI. Everything is moving in the direction of API's and Python or other scripting languages for configuration. All the college kids we just hired are python wizzes. And to them everything is an API. A command line for them is only for running the scripts they just wrote. ... View more

I have some news I can report. We had a come to jesus meeting with the Cisco company folks at Meraki development and sales and such. Relief is soon on the way and it will arrive soon. I have no clue if what they told me was confidential or not so I won't go into too much detail. I can say they are aware this was a huge problem and have made a lot of changes on the back end to deal with this. A patch to 14.x is coming soon that will fix all of this. Going forward new feature additions will not be done at the cost of regression of old bugs either for the 15 beta. I can also say future Meraki hardware is going to be on the catalyst switch infrastructure. So you may want to hold off on swapping out MS390's for older Meraki hardware. A fix for these issues will be here in weeks. We walked away thinking that we will continue to deploy this platform as long as these patches pan out and the changes to QA are implemented and stability is kept. They seem to realize how damaging this was to their reputation and are serious about fixing it. A this point I would not trade a MS390 for a 7 year old Meraki design switch. Swapping for catalyst I would do as long as I didn't have to run a mixed environment. ... View more

So are the MS355X a newer version of the MS355? Or are they the current MS355-48X switches? Just trying to figure out if a new MS355 is on the horizon and you have a beta switch. ... View more

I can say they are definitely aware of the issue. And progress is being made. It's just happening very slowly. ... View more

Interesting Bur20. Ours have not. I'm trying to nail down exactly what is causing so much instability.   Are you making a lot of L3 changes to the switch on a regular basis like in  hosting environment?   Are you connecting the Meraki to other vendors or Cisco Catalyst STP topologies?   I am highly suspicious the instability comes from bugs in STP and SVI creation/deletion/changes. ... View more

Did you do the reboot from the CONSOLE TWICE. (Not by pulling th epower plug) trick? Ther eis a microcode update that gets applied ONLY if you do a graceful shutdown from the console. it never gets applied if you reboot by just power cycling. We verified this through experiments. ... View more

Great news!. Ours now are still stable and not dropping off the console now weeks later after those reboots. I wish they would have mentioned this in the firmware read me. We figured it out by blind luck. ... View more

These are the things we did that finally brought stability to our MS390's. We are running 14.32   1. Completely isolate spanning tree on Meraki network from any Catalyst PVST spanning tree using BPDU filters on the catalyst side and turning off RSTP on interfaces connecting to catalyst from the meraki side. Catalyst and Meraki STP do not play nice together on the MS-390.  2. After any L3 SVI changes (Adding removing, or moving VLAN subnets), reboot the entire stack. Other MS390 stacks on the network may need to be rebooted too. We just wait till the evening and reboot ALL of them. This is a known issue. 3. After updating to 14.32, make sure to reboot the MS-390 stack TWICE from the Meraki console. (Not just pulling the plug. FROM THE CONSOLE) The switch will take a long time and some strange lights will flash during one of the reboots. We suspect some type of firmware/rommon update is being applied quietly. But t6he switch will not apply this if you just pull the plugs or cycle power. it has to be a graceful from the console reboot to trigger it.   After all of this, they quit dropping off the console and have been relatively stable.   We also found in some cases with clients application layer firewall filtering on Palo Alto, Checkpoint,  or FortiGate was causing issue with blocking management plane traffic to the cloud. Make sure the switch IP;s are exempt from any IPS/IDS or L7 firewall filtering or expect problems.    If you are using these as Data Center switches in a hosting environment where constant layer three changes are being made, you may want to consider Ronnies advice and get them swapped for native Meraki switches as the constant rebooting may be unpalletable. ... View more

so one thing we did to fix this issue is we noticed some things going on under the hood regarding the latest firmware. If you are running 14.32, make sure to reboot the stack TWICE from the meraki console. It HAS to be done from the Meraki console. You can't just yank the power plugs.on the second boot after the firmware update is applied, the reboot takes MUCH longer and it appears as if some kind of microcode update is applied. We noticed if you do this, then the switches quit dropping off the cloud console. ... View more

I sus[pect a lot of folks are having resume moments for buying into these. ... View more

we had similar issues except it was with Catalyst 4506E chasis running IOS XE.   If you want the 390's to work reliably, do this.   1. Allow no spanning tree interactions between the 390 stack and any catalyst switches. We also tried MSTP and it just did not work. This means RSTP off on any ports that connect to catalyst on the meraki side and BPDU filters on that connection on the cat side. 2. If the MS390 stack is doing the routing, then any time you make a L3 change on that stack, like adding an SVI, reboot the whole stack. We found doing this makes the switches work correctly. Usually an L# change would take ours down and have them acting in a very bizarre fashion. 3. Use the latest firmware. They just pushed 14 to stable and already have v 15 in beta with regular updates. We have found the stability and functionality get a lot better with each update. But we also discovered sometimes you will need to reboot the switch more than once after a firmware upgrade. We found sometimes after an update the switch would reboot mutiple time son its own as it were doing microcode and ios XE updates under the hood. but deferring to later reboots to do other things. 4.Hard code spanning tree topology using priorities in switch settings. Set roots, then next layer down 2nd tier , 3rd tier etc. Don't leave this up to chance. 5. Don't use VLAN 1 as a data bearing VLAN. ALso prune vlan 1 of any trunks. ... View more

AVOID these switches like the plague.Trust me on this. Unless you want to explain to managers why you spent vast sums of money on equipment that doesn't work. And you enjoy downtime and tons of intermittent unsolvable issues. Scan the forums here. these MS390 switches look good on paper but DO NOT WORK. DO not risk your career future by buying these defective bombs. ... View more

I agree 100%. I would love to have all these features in a 390, but don't risk my career by making me have to explain to my customer why this turd doesn't work. especially for the ridiculous price of these switches compared to Aruba or others. Only sell it when it actually works! ... View more

These clients are very large deployments. Think hundreds of MS390 switches. With thousands-tens of thousands of host connections. And these are large public institutions in the public eye. I can't say anymore than that. ... View more

Unfortunately my management is going to continue with this believing the code will get straightened out and it will future proof the customers for "new features" that the existing Meraki hardware won't support. meanwhile over the weekend one client had an entire stack go offline Saturday and they had to reboot them to get them back online this AM. ... View more