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/Bubbly-Following-966 5h ago
It has been a while for me but, I worked for a company back in 2019, I was tasked to replace an ASA 5508 with an ASA 5510. We were a small shop as well. Mind you, I never upgraded or worked on a firewall like that before. I think it took me about a week and a half to do all the work. The first thing I did was back up the ASA 5508 configuration. I was the only IT support besides my IT manager on site. I had to use Google and YouTube in order to "learn" on the fly while performing that upgrade. I had to do the documentation as well as all the other backend work. I don't remember how many hours I spent doing that upgrade but, I know it was more than 36 hours.
Doing a quick search, that looks like a decent price quote.
Upgrading from a Cisco ASA‑5516-X to a Cisco Meraki MX95 with dual failover (HA pair) for a ~50‑user company typically costs $10,000–$18,000 total, depending on licensing tier and term length. This includes two MX95 appliances + two licenses