Cisco Meraki vMX100
Cisco Systems, Inc. | 1.0.0Linux/Unix, Other 3.18 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Great Product Easy to Install
This have been a great tool to get remote sites to the cloud quick, cheap and since it supports SDWAN no downtime.
- Leave a Comment |
- Mark review as helpful
Helps Bridge the Gap
This helps bridge that gap between virtual and physical meraki devices. We have 40 physical merakis we need to connect to. It works well. As you know third party VPNs are a pain to work with Meraki. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It is a slim down version of the physical appliances. You do not get all the bells and whistles. It does not offer dual WANs, intrustion detection / prevention, but does offer traffic shaping and firewall, and of course VPN. I am sure in the future Meraki will add more features. It would be nice to try it without licensing for those who are curious, but you cannot do that unless you get a license to add to your dashboard. It would be nice to have HA mode for different availability groups. Overall I like it. You will too if you are a Meraki shop.
Almost there
The product takes MX100 functionality and runs it as an EC2 instance. This has allowed us to join a VPC as a Site in our Meraki Dashboard and have it participate in the Site to Site VPN Mesh.
- Previously connectivity to AWS was hindered because 3rd party VPN connectivity from Meraki to AWS is a 3rd party connection. Given multiple premise based MX devices at several sites, you can't set them up to all connect to one AWS based VPC because the UI errors stating a IP overlap due to the VPC's cidr being entered on two seperate 3rd party VPN configurations. This is a gap in Meraki's software that is partially solved by deploying the vMX.
- I say "partially" because I don't feel it is a tech for tech drop in replacement. AWS VPN Connections offer 2 peers in an HA fashion that fail to each other during issues or code upgrades. Meraki offers this type of ability in their physical MX devices but they are not yet offering it in the vMX line. This addition would really add value to this solution.
Cost: My company has numerous premise locations. without vMX, connectivity from several Meraki sites to one VPC normally requires an AWS based VPN tunnel for each site. At $0.05/hr for these it costs me around $2000 a year per VPC. Current MSRP pricing (5/19/2017) for the VMX license that replaces the AWS native VPNs is $5000 for 3 years. With about $700 in EC2 cost per year if you run it on demand. This is near break even per year when compared to native AWS VPN Connections for us. Reserve pricing could help and total ROI will depend on the number of sites you need to connect to each VPC.