A couple years ago I took a new job that was in the middle of planning a replacement for their 6509E core and 120 2960 building access switches (spread across around 25 buildings). They were sold on replacing the 6509 with a stack of 4 Meraki MS425's and using the MS350 in the buildings. I got the joy of implementing the 425 stack first and after some headaches we finally got things working and it was surprisingly ok. We have purchased and installed about 70 of the 100 MS350's as well which are just being used as layer 2 access switches which they seem to be fine for. All layer 3 routing (170 vlans) happens on the 425 stack.
The honeymoon phase is over with the 425 stack. Firmware with massive bugs and issues with upgrades taking the whole network down because of issues with ARP table getting out of sync in the stack etc. have made me want to replace it but I don't know if there is going to be budget to do so for a couple years. I have access to two brand new Nexus 3172PQ's that were bought for a different project that never happened. My thought was to set them up with vPC and replace the 425 stack but keep the MS350's for building access switches.
I know the port buffers aren't that great in the 3172 but everything will be connected to it over 10Gbps. The highest I ever see the port usage go on any of the MS425 ports is around 350Mbps. I only have static routing on the 425 and that is only a default route that points to my PA5220 firewall pair. I also absolutely hate that I have access to zero logging on the core stack (thanks Meraki).
Am I crazy for thinking about doing this? Long term I would probably replace this with an appropriate Nexus or Cat 9K.
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