Technologies: Failover & HA

  • Cellular & dual uplink support
  • Warm spare failover
  • Datacenter High Availability

Mission critical networks can’t afford downtime and disruption. Cisco Meraki MX Security Appliances support multiple layers of redundancy, ensuring WAN connectivity, appliance availability, and seamless failover for branch sites.

Failover diagram

3G/4G Cellular & Dual Uplink Support

Every Cisco Meraki MX Security Appliance supports dual WAN uplinks with seamless, automatic failover—necessary for protection against ISP connection outage. In the event of failover, the MX's built-in traffic prioritization engine redirects flows and allocates capacity based on your prioritized application needs, ensuring smooth network operation. Supported uplinks include gigabit Ethernet and cellular comprised of 1xEV-DO, W-CDMA, and HSPA from major cellular carriers, as well as 4G cellular, including LTE and WiMAX.

Warm Spare Failover

Warm spare failover ensures the integrity of MX service at the appliance level regardless of deployment mode. In the event an MX goes offline, a secondary MX will automatically take over its duties—ensuring a site is not deprived of functionality like industry-leading intrusion prevention, VPN, application and client control, DHCP service, and more. The Meraki MX uses the Virtual Routing Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), so networked devices need no additional configuration or intervention to begin using the spare MX.

Datacenter High Availability (HA)

Datacenter failover is a mission critical requirement for organizations securely tunneling branch sites to datacenters. Cisco Meraki MX Security Appliances support secure tunneling between sites using either mesh or hub-and-spoke topologies. You can specify which datacenter to use as the primary resource for shared subnets, along with a list of other priority hubs to failover to in the event of outage. If a site goes offline, branches will automatically fail over to a secondary (or tertiary, etc.) datacenter that you specify.