A customer of mine has purchased a number of Meraki switches for various purposes, which I am tasked with deploying.
I've found the documentation to be woefully inadequate, and completely glaze over quite important points, and I was wondering how other people in the field are efficiently deploying these devices.
To paint a typical picture of a customer's network:
Downstream Meraki Layer 2 access switches <-----> Meraki Layer 3 Switch with SVIs <-------> Cisco ISRG2 Router <------> Rest of network.
I've staged the Layer 3 switch via the Meraki dashboard, adding all the necessary SVIs. As the devices don't have the concept of a "routed port", I created a separate VLAN / SVI for the connection between the Cisco Router and the Switch (just a /30 subnet), and assigned that port as an access port in this VLAN
Now the issue, which the documentation glazes over: "Install and connect your switch(es) in their desired locations, provide power and a connection to the Cisco Meraki cloud"
I would never normally assign a network device an address over DHCP, so I wanted to go the way of static configuration. I factory reset the device, gave it an address in the correct VLAN, with correct default gateway (staging in a lab, so I configured the lab router with the same addressing as will be present in production). The device is then simply unusable, and unreachable. From the test router, it is pingable, but it's not possible to browse to any web interface.
I then factory reset the device, and then simply connected via default port to a test router with a DHCP server attached. The switch joins the meraki cloud no problem. I then had to manually change the management interface through the Meraki dashboard to what it was before, and then swapped the port that was connected to the original interface that i had tried to configure statically. After a few minutes this finally came up and is reachable.
Next I tried to do the same with a downstream layer 2 access switch. I'm connecting to the Meraki Layer 3 switch via a 10G Twinax cable, with both sides configured as a trunk and passing all VLANs. The native VLAN is VLAN 1, which is not used on either device. VLAN 201 is what is configured as the management VLAN. I go to the local interface, try and set the details there statically, but the device never connects to the Meraki cloud. The management interface (VLAN 201) on this layer 2 switch is pingable from remote networks, so there's no issue with routing, and it also has a default route. But still not accessible via Meraki, nor from the 1.1.1.100 address.
I tried the same trick with factory reseting and using DHCP connected directly to the internet, but then when trying to change it to use the management VLAN and its permanent static address, the device is then unreachable.
What the hell is with these devices? No local access or connectivity troubleshooting is possible from the device? I have to factory reset it and connect directly to the internet if I want to do anything on it? This seems ridiculous.
I've been certified CCNP Routing & Switching for 14 years, and CCIE Voice / Collaboration for 6 years, so I'm not an idiot, but would appreciate advice on how people integrate these devices into a traditional enterprise network.
