Cisco Meraki MS Reviews

Meraki Switches are great for most mid to large size environments where ease of management is important for the team of network admins. Meraki can be managed by less experienced admins and Meraki Support is super helpful when needed. These switches can be used in any environment in need of robust switching. Small business with single locations may be better served by more basic switches.

Meraki support is always helpful when we run into any issues. They have helped us through config and best practices in many cases as well. They have been one of the most effective support groups I have worked with. The only occasional downside is more unique to us. We use some Cisco Catalyst switches for data center management and other Layer 3 functions. When issues come up in the Data center that has both Cisco and Meraki, the two support groups tend to shift blame towards each other for a bit until we find the issue.

I’d typically install these devices as access layer switches. Now, depending on the use cases I’d potentially choose a model that is capable of taking a redundant power supply and has the capability of physical stacking. It is possible to create virtual stacks as well. I don’t typically deploy these switches as core devices as there is limited support for routing protocols.

Generally, the online support that you get through the Meraki portal is excellent. You can raise, update and close your calls from the Meraki portal. You can also purchase a product called Meraki Now! with response contracts similar to Cisco’s Smartnet, however, it’s really dependant on what jurisdiction you are in - something to check before ordering!

Meraki MS switches are an excellent choice as distribution (campus) switches for a small to medium-sized enterprise like mine, although I can envision them being really useful in the same role in a large enterprise, as well. You probably won't want to use them as your core switch(es) because there are some important advanced L3 features that you won't find on them, but as I said, for a small business that is not looking for complex addressing options and HA / SRST options, they would be fine in the core. Just do a little bit of homework if Meraki MS is going to be your only network switches including core(s). As always, if you DO use them in your core, be sure to have full redundancy (have a warm spare nearby) and make sure you understand how to swap Meraki MS switches on the web control GUI so that you can do so quickly if needed.

Meraki support is excellent. They are also highly proactive. They literally replaced all of a particular model of our MS switches when it was discovered that they were not sure about the longevity of a particular chassis fan inside those switches. Without us having to do anything other than ask, they shipped us all new replacements (with a better fan in them) for the 10 or so of the switches that were in the affected model group, and we shipped the defective ones back to them int he same packaging, prepaid. None of the recalled switches had ever experienced a fan failure, but they were not willing to let them run in a production environment. I like that. Meraki MS support staff are also quick to get back to you and very knowledgeable about their product. I actually contact our Meraki rep to instigate a support case (although i could call support directly), and he gets the details from me first, then opens the ticket for us and explains it to support. This means that I only even need to talk to one person, and I like that, too. Meraki MS switches are designed to be essentially "plug and play", so support is generally not needed unless the end user is not following the deployment and operation guides.

Cisco Meraki MS Switches are the best in the market place. They are cloud supported, easy to configure and full featured. If you are doing any scale of networking that involves multiple-use scenarios and a variety of devices, Meraki MS Switches are the best choice. Cisco support is second to none and the switches have a great ROI.

Cisco support for the Meraki products is great. I have a dedicated representative who I can reach out to at any time. They offer numerous online resources and easy to follow tutorials to help the most novice user feel like a pro. When I need support they were ready and quickly helped me solve my problems.

Cisco Meraki MS Switches perfect suit in organizations who don’t have a formal IT team in each branch and want to optimize the operation. Users support, updated information of the network, connected Meraki AP (to get full visibility). Also, it is recommended in the hospitality complex and retail. There are tons of functionalities that help develop new features in the network to offer new services to clients.

Cisco Meraki MS Switches offer you a 7x24 support in various idioms. They have the best SLAs in the industry. In the case of RMA, Cisco Meraki MS Switches sends you a new switch instead of pieces replacement (and if your switch model is out of stock or EOS, they send you the latest model in the market).

For the company with a smaller IT staff, these switches are great. This allows us to do some of the analytics and customization ourselves without relying on an outside vendor all the time. We do not have to have a full-time CNA in-house in order to manage our switches.

Ease of use, great Cisco support, customization, and security all contribute to this. One of the other great factors is the ease of setup and customization right from the start. We are able to get our systems set and start running analytics right away to provide reports to upper management quickly.

Cisco Meraki MS Switches are well suited to companies with small IT staff. The dashboard makes it easy to configure and manage. They are great switches but they do not have as much power as the regular Cisco switches. The Cisco Meraki MS Switches are not good for Network Backbone or SAN switches. I would use a regular Cisco switch in those cases. In my scenario, the Meraki switches were used for Users, Cameras, Phones, and Printers. The regular Cisco switches were used for the Backbone, servers, and SAN.

I've never had a problem with tech support. They were very helpful every time I called them. Meraki will proactively let you know when they release firmware and you can automatically schedule it to be installed. They will advance ship replacement switches so you don't have to lose productivity and plan your downtime.

Meraki has all of the range of switches. We use them for data center critical load/access. They may be suitable for user-level access as well but a little overpriced with licenses and support cost.

We have few cases with support for Meraki switches. One of the issues was with ports and VLANs configuration - really unclear situation.
We had a faulty switch and tried to replace it with a new Meraki. Tech expertise from Meraki support was quick and professional.

As an L2 switch, Meraki switches are great in just about any environment. I use an 8-port switch at home or we have entire facilities that have multiple 48-port switches. While there have been some times that we elected to use a straight Cisco switch as opposed to a Meraki, I honestly can't think of the reason why. I can say that it was extremely minuscule.

While it's rare that you need to reach out to support when we did it's been a pleasant experience. They were able to quickly diagnose what is going on, and where the issue is with bad config.

For any business with small hub sites, Cisco Meraki is perfect as you can manage that infrastructure remotely from your headquarter campus. However, the larger enterprise will struggle within the Meraki space as it is missing critical features—IPAM, network monitoring, built-in 802.1x, reporting. There have been great strides so far within the space and I think there are more to come!

The support team at Meraki unbelievable once you get them on the phone or through email. For the past 15 months though it seems like there is a lot of change and minimal L3 support for escalated troubleshooting. A lot of assistance is needed from your neighborhood solutions/technical engineer.

We find that Cisco Meraki switches are very well suited to locations or businesses that need basic switching with little management or upkeep required for them. They are also well suited to companies that would like technicians of all levels to perform basic functions like assigning vlans to ports given that the interface is very simple to use.

We have never had any problems with the customer support, always quick to respond and always very helpful.

If you can afford them, you will not be disappointed. Really, find a way. This is the way networking should be: managed in the cloud and fun! And I have learned to trust these things. I've never had a network issue that can be traced to these switches. The two years I've had them in place have taught me these are reliable. I no longer worry about my network. They can work on any size network, although they honestly would be overkill for a home office or the like. They scale, so you can power anything from a small office like mine to an entire campus or municipality, managing everything through the cloud, so it doesn't matter where the network admin is in relation to the hardware.

I've used support a half dozen times, and every time the response has been quick, professional and, most importantly, highly competent. I could not be more pleased with Meraki's support.

The Meraki solution is best suited for sites/customers who want a one-stop-shop for cloud management of their network. You can set it and forget it, to a certain degree, and make changes on the fly. The solution is less appropriate for sites/customers who feel that they need only physical access to their network devices, and have not come to terms with cloud management.

All of my experiences with Meraki's support have been outstanding. They make sure things are operating the way the switch was/is intended to work in the network.

Great for small to medium business, especially when you don't have the budget for top-line engineers. They are pretty easy to set up for someone familiar with networking without having to do everything via command line. We have about 250 users and they work quite well in our various sites.

Cisco Meraki MS Switches are perfect for any small business or home network. Meraki is also perfect for an enterprise-grade solution such as dorms and many campus environments. They are a very robust end product to deliver network to your customer! I would not personally use Meraki as my core switch to delivery the core backbone infrastructure but would as distributions. Meraki will impress time and time again.

For internal iSCSC and other internal networks that do not connect to the internet, this is not a good solution. I would recommend other Cisco products. If you are an MSP, you need to get your customers over to Meraki. You will be able to see the status of the networks you manage in one place.

It is well suited for organizations that have a large inventory of equipment that needs to be managed from a single dashboard. It would work very well for organizations that have multiple locations and want to be able to manage from anywhere.

VOIP phone environments. Environment with heavy duty access of high volume devices

From small companies to large ones these are invaluable tools. I would say though that I would not use them in my Core SAN stack, where Nexus CISCO switches are likely a better fit.

The few times I needed it we got things fixed within 15 minutes. Outstanding.

Meraki Switches seem well suited for most situations. They support all major features, setting up QoS and VLANs is very straightforward. We use them with some Cisco IOS devices. The dashboard gives you a good look at the clients connected on your network even when they are on a non Meraki neighbor device.

Great for most scenarios where you want intelligent switches and either have little knowledge on switch configuration (e.g. the standard Cisco range and the dark art of learning their configuration language)or a detailed knowledge and enjoy the ease of the interface to get complex configurations done for you.