topic Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion in Wireless

Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

patoberli — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 15:16:05 GMT

Hi all

Today I received my very first Meraki MR33 AP, after having used Cisco APs since the AP 1230 model. I have to say, I'm pleasantly surprised about the hardware quality of the Meraki and I think Cisco could learn/adapt a thing or two from Meraki here. I haven't yet booted it up, so I can't comment on the software side.

I also know that Cisco models are more Enterprise customer targeted, while Meraki is more into the SMB market, but now with Mobility Express, I think those lines disappear somewhat.

So, why do I write this post? I wanted to share what I found really pleasant about the Meraki.

The Meraki MR33 is around half the size and thickness of an AP2800, more like in a rectangular shape, compared to the square Cisco. The MR33 is of (much) lower 802.11ac speed than the AP2800, so that's probably a reason for the smaller size.

The wall bracket of the MR33 is really nice! It contains a tiny water ruler, so you can correctly mount it to the wall. It also has a cardboard paper, showing a description to all the possible mounting holes and variants.

It's also really easy to attach, unlike some of the Cisco brackets, which can be a real pita. It offers a way to put a screw into the AP to saveguard it, but there isn't a way for a safety lock.

Also very nice, the package also contains all needed screws, for all mounting variants (as far as I can tell), unlike my last few Cisco APs.

The LED of the AP is on the bottom and small, this can have positive and negative effects.

Anyway, I think I really like this mounting bracket and would wish that Cisco could improve theirs a little bit.

Thanks for reading

Patrick

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

Ric Beeching — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 06:30:55 GMT

Hey Pato,

Great summary! I felt the same way when first accessing Meraki, particularly with the cloud-based features you or your customers can access to manage the APs etc. My few thoughts in favour of Cisco are:

If you prefer on-prem/private-cloud management Cisco is the way to go.

You can control software upgrades (I think Meraki is just automatic?) although perhaps this just indicates Meraki is less buggy!

Hardware wise, Cisco is superior

Price wise, although Meraki seemed cheaper at first I found that at large scalability Cisco was cheaper but that was a while ago!

My conclusion from the very brief look into all this is that Meraki is great small offices and maybe even single sites like a school but for large enterprise I'd go for Cisco.

It's all up to the individual though of course so just my 2c :).

Ric

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

Scott Fella — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 07:14:12 GMT

I’m going to provide my 2cents also. Meraki works well and if you don’t like to manage a bunch of controllers and don’t care for all the fancy knobs, Meraki is a good choice. I’ve been working on Cisco for a long time and the one thing that I hate are the BUGs!!! I run both Cisco Enterprise and Meraki at home and I have never had an issue with Meraki. Look at the upgrade... it’s all done in the background. If you manage a large amount of controllers, Meraki I think is sweeter. I know folks whom switched to Meraki and live it. The fact that you can monitor from your phone to me is a plus. I don’t care too much about not having all the knobs but you need to know what best works for you.

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

patoberli — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 07:58:42 GMT

I personally dislike the cloud features, but I live in a country where we have much harder data protection laws, as for example in the US. I also dislike to be depended on a cloud provider. In the case of Meraki, if they decide to not anymore support a model, or get bought/bankrupt, they could decide to shut down their cloud and all your financial and time investment is lost.

It's also really hard to enforce our data protection laws this way down to the users, but this is a discussion for another time 🙂

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

Scott Fella — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 14:30:29 GMT

I hear you. We have sites all around the world and have to deal with data protection also:) What you said is true about almost any vendor. You have to look at the stability of the future of the company. Is it more of a risk to go with another cloud manufacturer like MIST or Mojo for example if the requirements are to move away from off prem. As far as models go, look at investment for many on Autonomous, then Converged Access and also WCS/NCS/PI? You will be forced to upgrade and invest more money into what you have. I see companies that have invested in Converged Access and or Mobility Express and has to revert to buying WLC’s and migrating. There is always a risk I think and you just never know. I do see more SMB and education go with Meraki, but do see a trend of enterprise also deciding to go to Meraki. I just like how easy it is to be honest:)

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

lcaruso — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 13:13:16 GMT

Scott, realizing this post is past two years, for a client who is considering replacing Cisco with Meraki and has a complex RF environment, do you see this as feasible given where Meraki stands today in their technology? This client has a requirement to allow the two system to coexist during a phased rollout with identical SSIDs and not sure that is even possible unless both sides can disable rougues on the same SSID.

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

patoberli — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 06:56:16 GMT

As long as they can't physically roam from the old world to the new world it should work. Roaming between the two worlds will be broken and the clients will always loose the connection if they decided to roam. So if you do this with the same SSID, make sure the clients don't see both worlds!

Regarding the capabilities of Meraki, I don't know, I have barely any experience with them (when I tested it last two years ago, the client debugging tools were abysmal).

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

j.hammel — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 20:45:25 GMT

Wow! This is a very enlightening read, for certain, and I appreciate everyone's input. We are a Cisco wireless shop (two WLC 5520, about 500 APs, two ISE nodes for 802.1x, Prime Infrastructure and relatively recent CMX installation for location analytics) across the 80 buildings in our network. Managing and troubleshooting ISE/PI/CMX does not work with our constant trend of doing 'more with less' (as all of us are facing). We stumbled into a Meraki outdoor AP installation and, in seeing that you can click 3 times in the dashboard and you're presented with these beautiful analytics (canned/built-in) reports is a thing of beauty, especially given the amount of blood I've lost on PI/CMX troubles. I'm not going to mention the moving target of Cisco licensing the last few years. This FY we're giving cloud-based vendors a serious look as far as what our next wireless revision will look like. Geek-noid knobs are great if you need them, but sweet Jesus needing multiple layers of servers to support said knobs is not efficient at all, IMHO. Cisco, Meraki/Cisco, and Mist/Juniper are the current front-runners that I plan to test with. I'll try to keep this thread fresh - I know it started over 2 years ago but the challenges still apply. More to come, hopefully sooner than later. Thanks all and Be Well...

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

ajc — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 17:00:31 GMT

My own experience so far:

Unable to manage by myself timers settings until version 28

F5 when using multiple Radius Servers no documentation about it. I will try the Cisco WLC solution

Upgrade left me with many AP's unable to reach the dashboard

Getting IP from DHCP is a nightmare no matter you configure the switch port as access and bounce the port. AP's still using the default 6.28.5x.X

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

Ambuj M — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:17 GMT

A lot of these issues are going away on 28.7.1, one of the major issue is AP disconnection from dashboard, although is does not affect AP operations. After disconnection AP will reload in 24 hour automatically to rejoin or you can manually reload them, Also keep in mind starting 28.6, meraki added new set of public ip and moved to standard port 443, so make sure that’s changed in your outgoing firewall rule, most customer have 443 open going out so it should be ok.

My 2 cent, I like meraki usability, if you have some coding background it’s even better. I find the radio quality in Cisco little better but negligible compare to other features on Meraki, standard 24 WIPS signatures does a decent job.
They got FIPS compliance in dec 2020 so it’s even ok to be used for federal space, which was one of the concerns in the early days. max capture packet size is 100k which sometimes may not be sufficient but gets the job done for most part.

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

ajc — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:00:55 GMT

Hi Ammahend,

We upgraded around 8K AP's to version 28.6 and many of them are unreachable. Meraki TAC is suggesting to downgrade back to 27.7 so I am wondering how is that possible if the AP's cannot even get an IP from native VLAN (for trunk ports) or access VLAN (access port)? Who told you about the "automatic reload" after 24 hours?. Our branch FW has already port 443 opened going to the Internet because that is an standard port for everything else so that would not be an issue. However, let me check in the firewall logs just in case. thanks

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

Ambuj M — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:45:38 GMT

Talk to your SE, this is one of the top issue for BU right now. They are well aware of this issue.

for the DHCP, I am sure you have done this already but let me ask anyways, have you done a wired packet capture on the AP, to see at what stage you are failing in DHCP process. have you checked for "BAD ADDRESS" entries on your DHCP server ?

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

ajc — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:00:32 GMT

We are currently escalating the case, hundred of devices down is not a good thing to have. We have seen those Bad Addresses in the past, let me take a look. We made an SPAN packet capture on the LAN switch and we can see the MAC address of the AP sending the DHCP discovery but we are not getting a response back. Something interesting that we noticed in the packet capture is a DHCP RELEASE message, I was expecting the actual DHCP sequence: Discover, Offer, Request, Ack so any ideas what the "release" DHCP message means when the Meraki AP did not actually have an assigned IP?, this does not make sense. In addition to that, we connected a dell laptop to the same LAN switch port where the Meraki AP was and we get all the expected DHCP sequence (4 steps/messages exchange) from a similar packet capture. Still investigating. thanks

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

Ambuj M — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 17:47:16 GMT

We have had a similar situation where the windows machine would not get an IP, but other devices would, turned out to be server replication issue and the way DC (also acting as DHCP) load balance request if there are multiple configured.
From your description it seems like meraki AP is doing what it’s suppose to do. The issue seems to be on server side.

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

Leo Laohoo — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 01:16:40 GMT

@ajc wrote:

AP's still using the default 6.28.5x.X

This is a bug since the time the 2800/3800 was released. We found out ourselves that this IP address is based on the MAC address of the AP.

We use a pair of InfoBlox as our DHCP server. We found out that we will hit this 6.0.0.0/8 bug if we point to the virtual IP address of the DHCP server. The fix was to point to the physical IP address of each DHCP server.

According to TAC, the APs prancing around with 6.0.0.0/8 IP address is not a bug.

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

ajc — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 02:28:14 GMT

Hi Ammahend,

I took your suggestion and we checked our secondary DHCP in the active-active cluster finding out that some of the scopes were in status = deactivated. Once the server team fixed that issue everything back to normal. BUT, as per following Meraki Community post, there are multiple users facing the same random Meraki AP disconnection, all of them happening after upgrading from 27.7.1 into 28.6.1. Some of those users are even posting their Meraki Support Number as a reference. After the DHCP part was fixed, we have also seen those randomly disconnected AP on the Meraki Dashboard.

https://community.meraki.com/t5/Wireless-LAN/MR46-MR55-WIFI-6-AP-s-disconnect-from-dashboard/m-p/150403?utm_source=communitymembers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=immediate_general%27#M20883

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

patoberli — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 06:55:19 GMT

Yeah that Dashboard Disconnection is a still open bug with Meraki. Luckily
the AP still works, even if it shows as offline on the dashboard. We are
also currently awaiting for a fixed firmware.

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

JyrkiHalonen — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:01:14 GMT

I think Meraki is good option for small / medium branch and campus networks

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

JPavonM — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 12:51:26 GMT

Meraki is all about marketing, like having 9Gbps on the APs. Plug 'n Play is not all enterprise users need (if it works properly out-opf the box, becuase you can spend hours trying to change mgmt VLAN on switches until you reach to a solution).

After many years working with Meraki and Cisco, with all the portfolio, I'm very dissappointed by the fact that every "advanced feature" you want to configure on the Merakis, you need to open a support case to enable it (disable LLDP/CDP per port in switch? Come on), and only sometimes they provide you with a way to configure it by yourself enabling the feature in the dashboard (802.11w on APs for example).

If Cisco wants to place this solution as enterprise they should provide more advanced features like other cloud solutions in this market.

Re: Cisco vs Meraki, my personal opinion

Scott Fella — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 15:04:27 GMT

There will always be a divide between, ease of use vs I want to have all the knobs. This has always been the case, but I will be honest, not having to configure a lot of "things" is great. I use a Meraki MX and MS as my primary devices at home. I also do have some Meraki AP's but I use the 9800's now, just because I like all the knobs when it comes down to wireless. I do have some IOS switches also, but I use that for testing. I onboarded my 9300's to the Meraki dashboard just to have visibility, even though its monitor only. It's nice because I can do that in Prod, have certain folks have monitor access so they can look at port info.