Cisco Meraki MX Firewalls is a combined UTM and Software-Defined WAN solution. Meraki is managed via the cloud, and provides core firewall services, including site-to-site VPN, plus network monitoring.
$595
per appliance
Cisco Meraki vMX
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cisco's Meraki Virtual MX (vMX) is a virtual instance of a Meraki security & SD-WAN appliance, dedicated specifically to providing the simple configuration benefits of site-to-site Auto VPN for customers running or migrating IT services to an Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
It is easier to implement and affordable. If you like Cisco products and you believe in their ecosystem and future, you will not be wrong selecting Cisco Meraki MX or Viptela from their portfolio.
I have used Sonicwall and Meraki, and they are very similar and functional, but they go about it in different ways. Meraki is a little more user-friendly with less of a learning curve, but it comes at a little steeper price. I do like the online dashboard of Meraki better, …
Meraki is more entailed towards larger businesses and allow much quicker support remediation. Meraki does have a yearly license, whereas UniFi does not. UniFi is really nice and I would use it in smaller single SOHO applications, but wouldn't use it for larger organizations …
When comparing the Cisco Meraki line to other products it became nearly an incomparable argument. While Fortinet and SonicWall were very comparable to the Meraki MX series, there were just too many tangible and intangible factors that led to us choosing Meraki. The biggest …
The VMware SD wan does give some better WAN metrics, but the interface is super clunky and doesn’t support a full stack. If Meraki could give some more QoE link metrics, it would be perfect.
Cisco Meraki vMX is great for small to medium businesses. It is easy to use with little out-of-the-box configuration. There is an easier learning curve on the Cisco Meraki vMX than on the SonicWall devices. We went with the Cisco Meraki vMX because we had the physical …
Meraki vMX is the most simple and intuitive platform to implement. It does though miss some security features that you get in Checkpoint CloudGuard og Palo Alto Next Generation firewalls.
Well suited for trying to bring remote sites quickly into your network. It's also suited as a device for remote access to basically quickly set up a secure remote access service to get users to actually access your network from remotely.
I think for us in our deployment model where it spoke to the hub, it certainly makes ideal sense. I would probably say with anyone that's signed in Azure or a cloud platform, obviously VMX appliance may not be suited. Anyone on Old Legacy MPLS may struggle to see a purpose for SD-WAN overlay of the top. But I think if you really want to introduce network communications that are low cost effective, solid in terms of availability and performance, a Meraki sdwan solution with the VMX appliance in the cloud is ideal.
It provides a really good single pane of glass so you can really easily identify end to end, what is going on in your environment.
It provides the ability for someone that doesn't necessarily need a really deep level of knowledge to be able to operate and maintain it. I think that's probably a big selling point, but I think definitely for the people that I'm selling the products who just having a dashboard and being able to log onto it and see if things are good or bad is quite key. So it does that really well.
The simplicity and ease of use for the Meraki Dashboard make it an easy choice for our organization to renew our Meraki Enterprise Agreement. We will likely continue using the Meraki MC67-C, MX450, and other MX models in their catalog until we shift away from Meraki completely
Some features simply aren't there, but the ones that are there are pretty easy to use. Sometimes it is easy to get lost when trying to find the specific device you want to work on, but that's mostly due to how rarely we have to go into the interface.
Meraki MX devices support high availability (HA) configurations, which ensures minimal downtime if one device goes offline. This feature has helped us maintain a stable and reliable network, even in cases of hardware failures. ince Meraki is cloud-managed, we've noticed that the cloud infrastructure is generally highly reliable, with minimal service interruptions or downtime. This makes it easier to manage the network remotely without significant availability concerns. Meraki automatically pushes firmware updates and patches, which helps maintain system stability without requiring manual intervention. These updates are rolled out in a manner that ensures minimal disruption to service.
The interface is pretty responsive. The lower end devices are easy to overwhelm if you have a lot of throughput. Be sure the model you get is rated for the amount of traffic you will have. Overbuild if possible, otherwise you won't be fully leveraging the connection from your ISP.
I haven't ever had a bad experience with Meraki support. On the few occasions where I wasn't understanding the UI or needed some clarification about what a setting actually would do, I contacted them and they were very quickly able to provide help. Returns are simple and fast, too. We had to return a defective device one time and they shipped the replacement before we had even un-racked the one that was faulty. Unlike many other vendors, they didn't ask use to a do long list of scripted diagnostics, they just took my word for it that the device was broken and sent out a replacement immediately
Implementing Meraki MX devices in phases—starting with a pilot group or select branch offices—was invaluable. This allowed us to identify potential configuration issues, troubleshoot problems, and refine our setup before rolling it out company-wide. It also helped to get feedback from early users and adjust the deployment strategy accordingly. The SD-WAN capabilities in Meraki MX were essential for optimizing our WAN traffic and ensuring better application performance across various locations.
The main difference is the administration through the Meraki cloud, the ease of access to review the configuration at any time, and the scalability that Meraki provides in terms of the ease of adding new devices, today in addition to how well the devices work is It is important that administration and troubleshooting be simple as it saves time in the event of failures.
The VMware SD wan does give some better WAN metrics, but the interface is super clunky and doesn’t support a full stack. If Meraki could give some more QoE link metrics, it would be perfect.
Due to the amount of traffic that some can handle, if the sites become too large, it is necessary to change the model, which is still a good option from the same family but still may be inconvenient for the budget of some.
I'm going to say positive impact. The biggest thing is especially coming from having a third party taking care of our network to us doing it ourselves. The ease of this with the overall high level visual that we can get as to how our day is starting and running reports to see how many outages have we had, what areas have they actually been in running these reports and being able to gather if it's a certain service provider that's causing an issue in a general area, maybe we need to switch service providers for ISP. So it's been great in that mannerism for us. Ease of manage, I mean, we have a limited number of staff, we have a lot of different offices across the country. And then this is relatively new for us because we did have a previous provider doing all of this for us.
