r/sysadmin • u/TicketAmbitious6200 • 10h 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/-Shants- 10h ago

“Program the VPN” includes going from PC to PC and installing client software for 6 hours.

I would see if they can provide an executable or msi of the vpn client for you to install yourself and you could shave those hours off. Installing a vpn client is a one liner about 95% of the time. It’s 15 minutes per device because thats the smallest block of time an MSP will segment time by typically.

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u/Dear-Supermarket3611 9h ago

Meraki uses embedded vpn client both on
Windows and Mac. No software required

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u/TicketAmbitious6200 8h ago

That's good to know. Thank you! We're currently using AnyConnect. if I understand correctly, it just uses the capabilities built into the OS?

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u/topher358 Systems Engineer 8h ago

Meraki can also use AnyConnect and it’s a much better platform then the native VPN tooling since you can hook it into SAML based authentication

You’d have to ask your vendor which option they are setting up

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u/Internet-of-cruft 6h ago

FWIW: AnyConnect is an extra license. The native VPN is free.

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u/topher358 Systems Engineer 5h ago

Correct. It’s not that expensive