Item: Cisco Meraki MX
Rating: 9
Author: Mustafa Lajam

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki MX

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Meraki MX is a game-changer for our enterprise and remote sites. Having a Security appliance that connects multiple WAN links provides stable connectivity and a High availability feature for your remote sites. Meraki MX connects your branch site with your HQ site while providing Firewall rules to control the traffic in the network.
We have established our Meraki MX 68 and recently connected with our Ms130. The Meraki dashboard provides a friendly GUI to manage the MX and its connected appliances.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Connect Multiple WAN links for HA and Load Balancing
Create and control your traffic with Firewall rules
Create SVI and VLANs to segregates the network and traffics.

Cons

Licensing can be a bit confusing and need focusing
Uplinks ports need sometime to be UP
Security appliance takes time to connect to cloud
Meraki Dashboard a little slow

Return on Investment

Relaying on med internet speed and let Meraki MX manage the traffic saved cost to use manager SD wan appliance.
Fast deployment and easy saved time and man power.
single GUI to manage save time to travel to remote site for support.

Simplified Management

Setting up Meraki MX is easy and fast, from registering licenses and adding the serial number for the devices to connecting the MX to the internet and cloud. After the MX connected to the cloud, it was easy to create a Meraki account and start adding organizations and managing the security appliance from there. This saved our engineers time to learn too much from vendors, which is, btw, the Meraki learning provides great courses to manage all Meraki products.

Integrations with other Cisco products

Cisco Meraki Dashboard, Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points and Cisco Meraki MS

We have connected our Meraki MS switches to Meraki MX 68 and forwarded the traffic upstream to the Security appliance, then we have routed the traffic to our enterprise network while controlling the firewall rules and allowed only trusted packets.
Meraki APS deployment was fast and forward. While connecting the AP to the Meraki MS switches, it appears in the AP section and starts assigning VLANs to allow guest internet only.

Scalability

We started only with the Main Meraki MX85 in our enterprise for our main hub, then we started adding remote sites with Meraki MX 68 and connected to our Main hub. Adding more sites and scaling the network is easy, and improving our connectivity saves time and cost to manage, or adding manpower with only 1 dashboard can manage all applications. Scaling and flexibility to change or expand our network are easy thanks to Meraki MX features.

Alternatives Considered

HPE Aruba Networking Switches, Cisco SD-Branch and Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series

Cisco Meraki MX provides simplicity and scalability while cutting costs. With Meraki MX, you get a Security appliance, router, and Firewall in one appliance and managed with one GUI. These features enable the network engineers to maintain large-scale enterprises with a single dashboard from a remote site or anywhere with internet, all thanks to the Meraki cloud dashboard.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Meraki MX delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Meraki MX's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Meraki MX live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Meraki MX go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Meraki MX again?

Yes

Other Software Used

HashiCorp Terraform, Cisco IP Phones, HPE Aruba Networking ClearPass Policy Manager, Cisco Umbrella, MobaXTerm

Likelihood to Recommend

We used Meraki MX with our remote sites and connected the MX 68 to our main MX 85. We routed traffic to our enterprise network and shared application and internet access to remote sites.
We have routed traffic and allow only trusted IP address sources using the firewall rules implemented in the Meraki MX.
In other scenarios, if the internet is lost, the Meraki will go offline; thus, stable internet access is important to maintain connectivity.

Cisco Meraki MX Feature Ratings

Comments

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Create and control your traffic with Firewall rules

Modules Used