Wednesday, March 20, 2019

My experience with Meraki

So a client of mine recently moved from Cisco/Palo Alto/Ubiquiti to all Meraki. They installed the gear and I configured it for them. In all it was about 30 switches 60 AP's and 20 "Security Appliances". Until this point I only played with Meraki a little bit and didn't really have an opinion of it.

After this migration I can honestly say that I can not believe anyone with even a slightly complex environment would use them. They seem fine for very simple installs but totally fall apart with anything even remotely complex. Some things they are supposed to support doesn't work (like changing the ip of outbound traffic from the default interface ip). It seems like every other thing I wanted to do wasn't supported. Need a PBF rule? Nope. Need a SNAT rule? Nope. Need a specific server to have a different ip than everything else for outbound traffic (like Exchange)? Nope (I plan to call support on this one though). The list goes on and on.

Another issue is some things would be SO MUCH FASTER if it had a CLI.

I also had lots of issues where the AP or switch would take FOREVER to actually take the changes I made. Sometimes it was fine but other times it would take several minutes. This adds up. It was also common for me to change an ip address of a device then wait up to 10 or 15 minutes and no change, then change it to something different and change it back again and it would take it right away. Lots of little quirks like this.

If Meraki was less expensive I would probably be happy with them for what they are honestly, but for the price I expected more. For the price of Meraki you can get lots of other truly enterprise brands, some even have GUI's that are easy to use.

Anyway, just wanted to share my experience for anyone wondering about how Meraki would do with something other than a 10 person branch office.



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