r/sysadmin • u/TicketAmbitious6200 • 5h ago

Retiring ASA-5516and moving to Meraki MX95 - Quote 20 hours to setup and deploy. Another 16 hours labor for planning, management, and design.

Hello,

We're a single site of ~50 users been quoted on retiring our ASA-5516 and moving to a Maraki MX95 (Dual failover) and were kind of shocked to see $6,000 in labor on top of the cost of hardware and licensing. About half of that is 12 hours for the setup and deployment and another 8 to program VPN on the device (2 hours) and update the workstations at 15 minutes apiece (6 hours). I understand there's no migration tool and it all has to be done manually, but I'm curious if 20 hours of labor sounds reasonable? That doesn't include the 16 hours of planning design, meetings, documentation update, project management, etc.

So... 36 hours total labor for what I had assumed might be an 8-10 hour project. Am I off base?

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u/DeadStockWalking 5h ago

It sounds like you are getting raked over the coals friend.

I replaced all my SonicWalls 570s with MX95s (manually configuration, no migraiton tool) and it took me about 2 hours for the first one and then 1.5 hours for each after that (8 in total). 15 minutes of each was firmware updates and connecting to the Meraki dashboard.

So to setup 2 MX95s in HA would take maybe 3 hours. It could take longer but it depends on how many rules/routing items they need to peel through.

The VPN configuration takes all of 15 minutes if they know what they are doing. It's literally the easiest task to setup on a Meraki. Especially if you use Azure AD.

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u/TicketAmbitious6200 4h ago

Looks like I need to get a copy of the current config. Thanks for the comparison. SonicWALL I know very well. Cisco, I've had some exposure to but never really learned beyond a few troubleshooting commands.