Meraki

MRCUR · ‎Aug 21 2017

For those of you who work with dedicated sales reps & engineers, I highly recommend working to a great relationship with those folks. I am not a Cisco partner so am not eligible for the partner specific certs/programs, but over the last few years have gotten the chance to speak directly with a number of the product managers, marketing folks, etc. and participate in some great betas. This didn't happen overnight, but if you talk to the right people you can get pretty great access to Meraki.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 21 2017

I have ~1,000 MR42/52's on 25.3 and it's working quite well. I moved a single network of MR33's to 25.5 and ran into a bug that made SSID's stop broadcasting...

MRCUR · ‎Aug 21 2017

Thanks to @CarolineS for getting this off the ground. Very excited for the future of the community.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 16 2017

@bholmes12 Yeah, that’s a Meraki quirk to stacking. I believe it’s because each switch runs its own management stack for Dashboard connectivity. I use DHCP now for my MS management VLAN’s which really cuts down on the overhead of the stacking IP needs. I know it’s a very different way of thinking coming from traditional switch management, but it’s worked really well for me.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 16 2017

This would be using 802.1X auth against your own RADIUS server.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 15 2017

@BHC_RESORTS We use the "auto" setting for 5GHz channel width. I'd say it's perhaps about 1/3rd of AP's that run at 80MHz after this change. This is a highly dense AP environment (one AP per room) in a dense urban environment, so it doesn't surprise me that many of the AP's are not running at 80MHz.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 15 2017

@Mr_IT_Guy I absolutely agree that AirWatch is a much more advanced MDM platform than SM, but as you see it comes at a (large) cost. But if you want to do serious Mac MDM based management, AirWatch is a great path to go down.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 15 2017

@Mr_IT_Guy Along the same lines - iperf built into the MXen would be really useful, especially since Support sometimes requests iperf tests to be run.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 15 2017

Thanks @TheMerakiGuy!

MRCUR · ‎Aug 15 2017

Given the way Meraki products are administered, I certainly get the argument for one big cert. The problem with that (as I think anyone with CMNO/CMNA would know) is that it doesn't allow for a ton of depth to the cert. @BradB I'd be very interested in certs for each product line that go into much more depth than CMNO did. I did really like the time and format of CMNO, so shooting for that with these other certs would be great. Given the simplicity of even the most complex deployments, I don't think this would be impossible. Self paced/self administered would be really, really nice as well.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 15 2017

How do I configure alerts in a Meraki network? Is there a way to email different people for different events?

MRCUR · ‎Aug 14 2017

Wow - I've rarely had issues with inaccurate client types. Most of my networks with MXen are run as IP tracking so I expect the device types to be wrong or blank, but for those where I have a full stack I haven't noticed these things. Dell iPod is pretty great though.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 14 2017

I'd really like SAML auth to support the various levels of MV access (live footage only, live + recordings, etc.). SAML is really nice for getting Guest Ambassadors access using their G Suite credentials, but unfortunately it's pretty useless for the MV right now.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 14 2017

@bholmes12 Ah yes, I didn't even think of that. Much like we say "It's always DNS", perhaps for MS issues we should say "It's always the MGMT VLAN". If anyone from the MS team is reading this, I'd say in general that the switches don't respond very well to not being in their defined management VLAN. Sometimes I just need to get a switch online in the "wrong" VLAN - I just wish they would behave a bit better when this happens.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 10 2017

If the switch is rebooting and there isn't anything obvious in the event log, I'd suggest contacting Support. They have access to a much more robust event log that will likely indicate why the switch is really rebooting.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 10 2017

This is amazing. The chef picture really takes the cake on the absurdity of the whole thing.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 10 2017

@bholmes12 I have not seen any unwanted transitions with VRRP. It's surprising to hear you're seeing that with the recommended setup of directly cabling the MXen together. Is there a surge of traffic at that time on one of the VLAN's the MXen can see? Might be worth creating a new thread here to see if anyone else has some ideas.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 10 2017

@MerakiJockey505 We don't deploy Android at this point, but my impression of SM is that it supports Android MDM quite well. Mobile OS' certainly seems to be Meraki's focus.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 9 2017

I've seen the latest generation of switches (MS350, MS225, etc.) do this when stacked. Try moving to the latest 9.X firmware beta. I know Support is aware of some stacking oddities. I wish I had a better sense of why this is happening, but all I can say is you're not alone.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 9 2017

You're probably going to have a hard time getting that level of detail out of an MV, especially if mounted to a wall and not sitting directly in front of the device you're trying to see. We use MV's in our data centers, but not as device monitoring and instead just typical intrusion/environment monitoring. I (unfortunately) think you're going to have a hard time finding something enterprise oriented with the level of detail you're looking for since it's not a typical security camera deployment.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 9 2017

We use Meraki's MDM (or EMM as the new buzzword goes) primarily for iOS management and also a bit on macOS now. For iOS I think Meraki is right up there with others like AirWatch, Jamf, etc. For Mac... not so much. When you are using the full stack, using SM just adds even more info which is really nice (like seeing policy compliance on the client page of an MR network). A lot of what SM can or can't do well comes down to what your org wants to do with it. But in general, at least for iOS, Meraki is extremely good about having day zero support for new Apple MDM features.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 9 2017

Despite the overall simplicity of the MX (and all Meraki) products, we've been very successful in a geo-redundancy deployment. One of the school districts we support has redundant data centers. Each site peers with a different ISP and has a dedicated router running BGP. Each site also has an MX600. We use Aruba 5400R switches at each site which have a direct 10Gb fiber link between them to create L2 adjacency for the routers and the MXen. Warm Spare (VRRP) has run quite well with this. The best part is allowing us to perform maintenance at either site without any interruption to Internet access across the district. This is a deployment that's probably on the more complex end of the spectrum for MX Warm Spare setups, but it works well for us and happily moves upwards of 2Gbps of traffic.

MRCUR · ‎Aug 8 2017

Hi everyone, I'm CR, an IT consultant for various public/private schools in Southeastern Pennsylvania. I currently support the full Meraki stack except for MC devices. Very happy to finally have a good place to discuss Meraki with other Meraki admins! CMNO #12 (thanks @GeorgeD!)

MRCUR · ‎Aug 8 2017

Are you thinking of changes that would cut off the device's Internet connectivity? Typically the devices won't actually apply the new config unless it successfully gets out to the Internet with the updated settings (although it may just be doing a simple ARP check which wouldn't necessarily indicate Dashboard connectivity).

MRCUR · ‎Aug 8 2017

Yes, absolutely. We run a mixed network of HPE/Aruba switching and Meraki (MS225's mostly). No issues out of the box with the default spanning tree setup on both sides. Very easy to do link aggregates between them as well as long as you specify LACP as the type on the HP side.

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