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Network Engineers 2 cents
May 30, 2022

Network Engineers 2 cents

Matt Painter, CASP CCNP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki vMX

Over the last couple of years, Meraki has revamped the vMX to resolve many of the issues I'd be writing about now, there are no currently ongoing issues I face. My only frustration is beta IKEv2 and the Meraki world of living in beta for key features. A couple of years back it was quite a beast to install Cisco Meraki vMX but in recent versions, it has been streamlined quite a bit better, in my opinion. I have deployed Cisco Meraki vMX to several retail chains where POS/DB etc lived in both Azure or aws settings and had to terminate 100+ small spokes to connect back and I never had any problems or issues with the Cisco Meraki vMX. For a good majority of users, this works well. There have been some quirks of who supports Cisco Meraki vMX or the cloud provider etc as there was a line of how far the tac users would go to troubleshoot but I believe that was resolved.
  • Mesh vpn
  • Set and forget
  • Simplicity
  • Kill beta concepts
  • System performance metrics that end users can see
  • Some users it knocks down on maintenance labor/cost
  • Negative would be if you didn't really vet the feature set to the customers needs and end up having to replace it short notice.
Being able to drop ship unconfigured hardware has been very good. This has saved a lot of time and resources being able to ship direct and configure remotely very quickly. Templating sites has allowed making sure every site is set up the same way as well. The API and marketplace offer quite an opportunity. We set up PURPLE with one casino customer that had great experiences with it.
This question is hard.
A chain of retail or gas stations hypothetically that have simple networks in nature would flourish and scale quite well with Meraki. A chain of banks or something more complex that has more complex requirements doesn't scale very well or at least presents many caveats. Routing has always been a big setup with Meraki but I've always managed to 'get by'.
I've used the FortiGate VM appliance many times and this was much better to use, it was a full feature set and had no setbacks ever. But people use Meraki for different reasons likely so it's not 100% apples to apples. As an SR engineer, I demand deep feature sets, etc, while some users strive for simplistic networks that are very visually appealing.

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

Yes

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

No

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

No

Did implementation of Cisco Meraki vMX go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Meraki vMX again?

Yes

I've never run into issues using Meraki on customers or sites that are simple or focus on cloud-based apps. Sites that have a lot of on-prem or are more complex appear to max the feature set that Meraki offers. Nothing is more frustrating than working with Cisco Meraki at a bank or customer that has compliance to manage.