Understand Cisco Meraki Cloud Networking Concepts

0:00The cloud really did change everything. It really changed the way that IT administrators and software developers worked. And networks, network engineers were not immune to that change at all. One of the most disruptive technologies to come out of the advent of the cloud was the Meraki. Line of products. The Meraki line of products are so incredibly fascinating and powerful because they're so incredibly simple to use. Typically, software defined networks and controllers were designed and relegated to the data center.

0:35But all of a sudden Meraki storms the scene, and now we have the ability to control entire networks across the entire world from one single login with just a few points and clicks. So this entire skill is to introduce to you what the concepts of cloud networking really mean and how the Cisco Meraki line of products really can benefit small to medium sized businesses. We'll talk about how they're laid out, how they're structured with organizations and networks, and then the basic steps to getting started building out your Cisco Meraki infrastructure.

1:08So lets get going.

0:00So the first thing that might stand out to you about Cisco Meraki is the name, Meraki. That doesn't sound like a Cisco platform. That doesn't sound like Cisco came up with that on their own, right? Well, the old adage, if you can't beat them, join them-- Cisco's is, if you can't beat them, buy them. And when it comes to the software-defined networking realm, Cisco is making it a point that every platform that they offer has some form of network automation, programmability, and software-defined controller to manage the platform.

0:32Cisco Meraki was one of the first entrances for Cisco into this space. They purchased Meraki specifically for the reason that it gave their small to medium-size business portfolio where they could offer products to small to medium-size businesses a huge shot in the arm so that they could get software-defined controllers and software-defined networking into that space. Meraki does it better than anybody else. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you how it works. Let's go.

1:02Cisco offers an online lab environment for every single one of their platforms. You'll find it right here, coming up on the screen, at devnetsandbox.cisco.com. You can register for a free account right there, and you have access to every single thing they have in their catalog that you can lab right now over the public internet. Meraki is not an exception to the rule. If you actually log into devnetsandbox.cisco.com, it'll take you to the lab catalog. And if you scroll down to the Ms-- it's all in alphabetical order here-- you'll get to Meraki.

1:37And what you'll see here is you'll see three instances of Meraki that we can interact with. One of these is always on, meaning it's always completely accessible to the public internet right now. Now the others, these are ones that you can reserve. It will spin up a private environment for you for the duration that you choose and then email you credentials on how to access that environment. But for now, we can accomplish just about everything we want to do using the Meraki Always On sandbox. So I'll click on the Always On sandbox, and this will be your first taste of how Meraki works.

2:13From here, you can scroll down and you see these access details. There's this link called Always On Read Only, we'll open that in a new tab. And these are the credentials to get logged in right here, devnetmeraki@cisco.com and the password is ilovemeraki. So from the dashboard login, I'll type devnetmeraki@cisco.com, and it will automatically change to this single sign-on but that doesn't work here. You'll want to do log in to personal account, and type in the password of ilovemeraki.

2:45And just like that, you're logged in. And like I said I was going to promise, here's how this works. Whenever I plug in a Meraki device-- maybe it's a firewall or a switch or a wireless access point-- as long as this device has internet connectivity, it will communicate over the internet to the Meraki cloud, and this is what we're logged into right now. We're logged into the Meraki cloud. So when we issue commands on the Meraki cloud like configuration changes, it will push down to all of these network devices.

3:21So the moment you plug in one of these network devices, even for the first time, they're reporting into the Meraki cloud to get their configurations. Now, before I go on any further on that, because we will go deeper into this, what we need to talk about now is, what kinds of Meraki devices can we purchase and manage from the cloud? So I'll clear the screen and we'll minimize this for one second, and here's what we're working with. We are working with the Cisco Meraki platform. And this particular playlist is all about the MX security appliances.

3:53The firewall appliances provide some of the most robust configuration for a security appliance I've ever seen at their price point. Meraki really got their name, though, with the MR wireless access points. They were first and foremost a wireless management company. The idea was, like most traditional wireless LAN controllers, you can manage a large, complex, wireless infrastructure from one single pane of glass, from one single log-in, and Meraki wanted to be able to do that from a cloud-based infrastructure.

4:23But then they tacked onto it with more and more devices like the MS series switches and then, eventually, the MX security appliances with the very robust advanced security features. Now, skipping one, they also have phones and cameras that are just as robust as anything else you would expect. The phones are pretty fancy. You can kind of see here, it's just one gigantic screen rather than a whole bunch of buttons. And then they have a mobile device manager as a separate license that is pretty fantastic too. So you can onboard iOS and Android devices to your mobile device management and manage all of your devices that are roaming or on the road from the Meraki cloud platform yet again.

5:02Again, what I'm here to talk to you about today is the MX security appliances throughout this playlist because there's a lot of fantastic capabilities that are involved with this. Outside of basic firewall rules, we also have something like layer 7 firewall rules which include things like geo-filtering and application-specific rules or URL-specific rules. We have things like AMP, which is advanced malware policies and protections. We have intrusion detection and prevention, content filtering and amazing monitoring and dashboarding capabilities.

5:36You'll even see how incredibly easy it is to configure VPNs throughout this playlist. But the idea that I want to drill home with this particular Nugget is that we have these different series devices-- the MR, the MS, the MX, the MC, and the MV-- all of which you just plug them in, and they instantly report back to the cloud controller. Do you see over here now what I'm talking about? We have the security and SD-WAN. This is where we can manage our firewall. The switch and switching infrastructure, the wireless infrastructure, all of these are now managed based on these little tabs that are over here on the left-hand side for our entire network.

6:12It's really fascinating. So this has been setting up the Cisco Meraki platform. The next steps are how you get started with Cisco Meraki. I'm really excited about this. I hope you are too. But in the meantime, that's been the offerings in Cisco Meraki. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00The next major concept that we have to understand before we deploy a Cisco Meraki infrastructure is the concept of organizations and networks. When you first purchased your Cisco Meraki device, you're going to create an account online at dashboard.meraki.com. This is where you will log in every single time to the Meraki platform and manage your devices. And immediately out of the gate, you're going to have to set something up called an organization. The organization is exactly what you think it is.

0:31It's your company. But you're kind of confronted with a decision. How do you want to manage this organization? Are you just one company? Are you ACME, Incorporated? Or are you a managed service provider, or an MSP? This is an IT consulting company where they are effectively the IT arm of all of their clients. So if I'm Knox's IT, and I have dozens and dozens of clients, I'll opt to go the MSP route, and that way I can set up sub-organizations for all of my clients.

1:07Most organizations that are signing up with Meraki are an individual standalone organization. They'll define who the organization is and who the organization administrators are, and then from there, they will set up their networks. Now we'll talk about networks a little bit more in a second. But I just wanted you to know that if you're coming from the consulting side, if you're a managed service provider, you do have the option of setting up as an MSP, where you can then set up your clients each as individual organizations from there. And then each of your clients will have their own set of networks from that point too.

1:40When we explore the DevNet sandbox and the demos that I'm going to be doing along this playlist, we're going to see things as the first option, as if we are one organization right here. You can see the organization section. So at dashboardmeraki.com, after the account has been created, we'll be an organization admin, and we'll have the ability to set up our organization from here. If I had set up as a managed service provider, I'll have the option to change my organization to be any of my clients right above the network section on this tab.

2:12But moving forward, we will say we are ACME, Inc. There's only going to be one organization, and within that organization, we're going to have multiple networks. Now that's a big thing to talk about is networks. When I talk about networks, what do I mean in Meraki's terms? It's not what you're thinking. You may be thinking these are subnets and VLANs. That's not what Meraki means. When Meraki means networks, they mean sites. So if ACME, Inc. was located in, let's say New Orleans, Louisiana, but within the city of New Orleans, we actually had four locations, each of those four locations would be a network.

2:54Within those locations, we can set up things like addressing in VLANs, individual policies like QoS, and individual content filtering rules. All of these can be applied at the location-specific configuration item or the network. So the big takeaway here is first of all, to know what kind of organization are you? Are you an individual organization? Or are you going to be a managed service provider, a consulting firm that has multiple organizations? And then from there, note that networks is not individual VLANs and subnets, networks actually represent your remote sites and locations.

3:30That is very important to understand. So check it out. Back here on the DevNet sandbox, if I actually click the little dropdown here, you can see all of the different networks that belong to this organization. There's a bunch of them that have been created. And in fact, I'll click the View All Network section just so that you can graphically see what they're talking about. Let's zoom out a little bit. It gives you a global map where you could see where these networks are physically located. You can also see the list of networks right here. So you create your account, you set up an organization, and then from there, the first thing you're going to actually need to do is create networks.

4:06To do that, under the organization section, now this account doesn't have privileges. But there would be a section right here under organization, and then configure where you can add your network. You'd simply give it a name and an address, and then you have your network setup, ready to go, and be configured. So the key thing that we're trying to drive home today is understand what an organization is. That's your company or any of your clients, if you're an MSP, and then your networks which represent your sites or branches. From within those sites or branches, we'll be able to configure VLAN subnets and policies later, and that's what this playlist is all about.

4:42So again, I'd really encourage you to jump into that DevNet sandbox and understand how the organization and network layout works. But in the meantime, that's been organizations and networks. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00When you purchase a Cisco Meraki device, you will get an email from your vendor that will contain a couple things that are going to be very useful to you, because you don't have to physically have your Meraki firewall in hand to start configuring. You can create a dashboard account now, create your organization, create your network, and then start configuring your network, so that all you have to do is simply plug in your firewall into the internet, and it will connect to the dashboard and automatically download all of the configs that you've already created.

0:35Fascinating, right? It's a great way to get up and running. But how does this firewall know to get the configs that you've created? Well, that's what adding devices to your network is all about. We'll simply tell them Meraki dashboard, hey, I've purchased this device. Here's the serial number. When it checks in, it belongs to me, and give it this configuration. Here's how we go about doing that. You purchase your device. You'll get an email that contains a purchase order number or a serial number. So we've created our organization, that's step one.

1:05Then, we've created the network, that's step two. Now, we need to add devices to this network. So to do that, what I'm going to do is we're going to go to Network-Wide and then under Configuration, we're going to add devices. So Network-Wide right here, I'll click Add Devices. And the first thing it does is it shows you what your current inventory looks like on this entire network. As you see, we've got a lot of devices here, and you can see they've just applied the serial number. So how do we add more devices to this? All we have to do is click the Claim button, and it says enter one or more serial number or order numbers right here one per row.

1:41So if I did ABCD 1234 WXYZ, I could click the Claim button, and it will automatically validate that that's a valid serial number and add it to this network. In this case, when you get the Meraki MX64 device you're going to get an email first that lets you know what the serial number of this device is or the purchase order number. You can create your organization, network, and then add that firewall to the network. At that point, you're ready to rock and roll. You can configure all of these things, so that when that device finally arrives at its final destination, you can plug it into the internet.

2:15It'll download all the configs that you've already done, and that device will be provisioned and automatically working, because it checked into the Meraki cloud. So that's all there is to adding devices to your network. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00OK. We've got an organization, we've got a network, and we've added our firewall device to this network. What do we do now? What I think we do next is we go through some basic network-wide configurations and make sure our entire network has some base configurations set up the way we like. To do that from the Meraki dashboard, yet again, we'll start with the network-wide section. And these tabs are typically broken down into a monitor section where you can get some reports or dashboards, and a configure section where we can configure the item that we're talking about, in this case, network-wide.

0:31So what I'm going to draw your attention to in this Nugget is the first two items, general and administration. Let's start with administration because it's the smaller and easier one. Well, this is where we can set up who is allowed to administer this network. We have organization-wide admins, meaning they can view and, a lot of times, configure most of the entire organization. Any network underneath it falls within their window. But you'll see right off the bat, the privileges are broken down into full or read-only. For instance, our account that we're using in the DevNet sandbox-- right here, DevNet Meraki, Do Not Edit-- is a read-only account.

1:04That's why we don't actually have the ability to create new networks, even under the organization tab. Even though we're organization admins, we can only read the organization level configs. We can't actually set the organization level configs. But if we scroll down, we'll also see there are network specific level admins. So someone could be a read-only organization admin and then have the ability to write or edit a network admin. We may also have a site admin where we don't want them to have access to the organization at all, but they can log in and have access to only their network and set things on the network that are relevant to them and their site.

1:41So administration is where we set up what users are allowed to do what within our organization or our network. Now the network configurations themselves-- we'll go back to network-wide and jump to the general configure section, and we'll see a lot more options. They're categorized with these big, bold letters here like General where we can set up things like what is the name of this network, and we can apply any notes or even a country and region or a time zone for the specific network. If we scroll down, we can see some other categories that I think are pretty interesting. Traffic analysis or reporting, this is one of the most powerful things that come with having an MX firewall, the ability to see who is doing what on our network.

2:19But we tell it how much data it should collect right here. The basic says we're just collecting generic traffic categories rather than the exact destination hostname. Or we can disable it altogether if we don't want to track traffic at all in that specific organization. Maybe we have security rules in place that say the Meraki cloud is not allowed to host or contain our traffic patterns. So that's why we would disable it. The DevNet sandbox has this currently set to basic, so you just see the generic categories. If we needed to create a custom pie chart for specific categories or specific ranges or reports, we could create that pie chart here, and it would populate that pie chart with our own traffic browsing data.

2:57Location and scanning is specific to a wireless item, which is pretty cool. It allows us to track how people are moving through our network physically based on how they're being scanned by the wireless APs. We have Twilio integration so that we can get text alerts, as well as CloudShark-- this is basically Wireshark in the cloud-- so that we can export packet captures directly to the CloudShark platform. Scrolling down a little bit more, we can configure individual devices to have local credentials as well as a local device status page, meaning that we could log into each local device from within the network using these credentials here.

3:33We can do things like turn off the ABL or set up a default block message when somebody approaches a section that is blocked by that network device. Now one thing I wanted to show you is these little eyes here are very helpful for showing you, what does this configuration actually do? You'll also see a "what is this" that you can pop out and see what this configuration would set to. So either pay attention to the eyes or the "what is this" if you see a configuration and you don't know what it does. Reporting-- we can report data into our own syslog or SNMP servers as well as NetFlow.

4:05And then firmware upgrades for the devices themselves. I think this is really cool because we could do try beta firmware. We could set when our devices are supposed to upgrade their own firmware, or we can tell it to go ahead and upgrade devices now. So these basic configurations will tell you how your network or site should behave. I think it's really important to take a look at this so that you could set up any sort of reporting-specific metrics that you want to track as well as set when your firmware needs to be upgraded on each of your devices. So that's been getting started with the Meraki cloud.

4:35This is how we can start setting up our administration and general site configuration. If you're following along in this playlist, in the next few skills, we're going to be talking about how to set up Meraki devices like an MX firewall. In the meantime, that's getting started with the Meraki cloud platform. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00So now that we're introduced to the Meraki dashboard, the little light bulb is flickering right now. Right? We're seeing the benefits of cloud networking because of how incredibly simple it is. I mean, the cost effectiveness, that's a big deal too, especially since we're talking about small to medium-size businesses. But even if we're a consulting MSP or if we have multiple branches or sites, all of a sudden, this single pane of glass to manage our entire network is a brilliant idea. So what I'd encourage you to do at this point is jump in that DevNet sandbox and click around a little bit.

0:33Because if you're following along on this playlist, we're going to dig into deeper things like how to set up VLANs and subnets, routing, VPNs, security features, and even proactive monitoring and alerting with webhooks. It's going to be really, really exciting and fun. But in the meantime, that's been introducing the Meraki platform and its cloud capabilities. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.