How to connect an MS450 for the first time

[CommunityBridgesNetwork]

Hello I am new to Meraki and am working on getting my MS450 Aggregation switches online along with my MS425 switches. I have my dashboard running and have added my devices and licensing to the portal. I have also successfully connected 6 MS390's. Those were easy because they have copper ports that connect easily to an upstream switch. Hehe in my case the upstream switch is an HP Aruba switch that will soon be decommissioned but I haven't informed the switch yet so I don't think it is blocking my progress.

Anyway the MS450 and MS425 do not have copper ports. They are all fiber ports and I don't stock any transceivers that are compatible with the Meraki switches. This means I have to connect them in a different manner but am not sure what the best process is. Anyone that can offer a suggestion that does not include a Copper transceiver is appreciated.

I did try connecting a fiber transceiver to the MS425 10G fiber port and then to the Aruba 10G uplink but that resulted in a blocked switch port and took all of the downstream MS390's offline. Any direction or documents that might help send my way please.

[Philip D'Ath]

If they are close to each other you could use 10Gbe copper TwinAx cables.

MA-TA-1M (1m cable)

MA-TA-3M (3m cable)

[Philip D'Ath]

You can use 10Gbe fibre transceivers as well.  Make sure you have configured whatever is the core switch to be the spanning-tree root.

If the network is loop-free plugging in extra switches should not take anything offline.  If you have loops try removing those, to begin with.

Also make sure the ports on both switches have the same config (for example, both are trunk ports with a native VLAN1).  Whatever is the native VLAN should have access to the Internet for the Meraki switches unless you configure them to use a different VLAN for management traffic.

[CommunityBridgesNetwork]

I did try the fiber twinax cable but it locked up so even though these are right out of the box and supposed to loop free I may have to configure that. Also the native vlan is a good point and I did verify that all of the connection are using it to access the internet.  I will verify in the AM all of these settings and suggestions and update my question.

[Philip D'Ath]

Fibre TwinAx is not supported.  Only copper TwinAx.

[CommunityBridgesNetwork]

I used this cable but it is possible the spanning tree was blocking everything so I will check that in the morning

Meraki 10 GbE Twinax Cable with SFP+ Modules

[CommunityBridgesNetwork]

Took me some time because of the long weekend but I was able to test a couple of things. First I am using the Copper twinax but it is not compatable with the upstream switch (HP Aruba) don't worry I have Meraki to replace the HP ;-). 

Then I used the Copper Cisco brand Twinax to connect from a fiber port on the MS425 to an MS125 fiber port. I made sure the MS125 was the STP root. The event logs show the cable plugged in but still no IP. The MS125 is the DHCP server and works for all of my camera's and other downstream devices. Both ends are connected with navtive VL1 and are trunk ports. 

I also tried using the 40g uplink ports using the same configurations but this didn't work either. I don't see any lights on either side of the link.

[CommunityBridgesNetwork]

The MS450 does not have any SFP or RJ45 ports so it looks like you have to buy some extra parts to get them connected to the internet. I did connect to the MGMT port and added a static IP, then connected and configured the QSFP+ ports to connect to my CORE switches but not a single port would come up in either end. 

My next step is to buy a Meraki QSFP+ transciever and a SPF transceiver and see if I can get those to work.

[CommunityBridgesNetwork]

In the end it was a defective switch that would not connect. So in case anyone else is connecting a MS450 here is how I eventually was able to get the good switches online.

The MS450 comes with 40G QSFP+ ports so you will need to connect to an upstream switch that also has a QSFP+ port. The rest is magic!