If you’re considering purchasing Meraki products, along with the device and model type, you’ll also need to make decisions on accompanying licenses.
Meraki requires an active license for each of the devices you use in your IT environment.
This licensing model has several benefits, such as paying for cloud-management and automatic firmware updates.
As a Cisco Meraki partner, we know first-hand that customers have a lot of questions about licensing. One of the common ones is if they should opt for co-termination or per-device licensing.
We’ll compare the two models in this article, but first, let’s review what each one is.
What Is Co-termination Licensing?
Co-termination licensing uses a weighted average to set a single expiration date for all of your licenses. The single expiration date of all Meraki devices is recalculated whenever you purchase new devices and licenses.
By default, Meraki customers are enrolled in the co-termination licensing model. You can opt for per-device licensing on your Meraki dashboard. However, once you switch to per-device licensing, you cannot reverse the decision.
What Is Per-device Licensing?
The other choice Meraki customers have is to license each device individually.
This often makes sense for businesses who know they’ll need to periodically renew licenses and want to spread out the cost instead of having all of their licenses expire at the same time.
When choosing which licensing model will work best for your IT environment, there are a few things you should consider:
- Feature set
- Activation
- Expiration date
- Past due licenses
All of Meraki’s products work with both licensing models. Which option you choose depends on what works best for your business’s needs.
By looking at these three areas, you should get an idea of what model is right for your company.
Co-termination vs Per-device: Feature Set
Both co-termination and per-device licenses have the same purpose of enabling you to use your Meraki devices and manage from the cloud dashboard.
With co-termination licenses, this is the end of the features with the licensing. If you opt for per-device licensing, however, you can include Cisco Umbrella with your wireless access points.
This integration gives you access to predefined Umbrella content filtering and security policies. With these policies assigned, the access points intercept DNS requests and redirects to Cisco Umbrella for validation.
Based on Umbrella’s policies, the user is either able to connect to the requested web page or is blocked and redirected to Umbrella’s block page.
Co-termination vs. Per-device: Activation
How you activate licenses differs depending on which license model you’re enrolled in.
With co-termination licensing, the time starts running against your expiration date starting when you purchase the license, not the date you add them to your organization.
This means you’ll want to activate your license in the dashboard as soon as you can because there is no time benefit gained from delaying the activation.
With per-device licenses, however, the clock starts ticking once you assign it to a device or 90 days after the purchase. This gives you flexibility when managing licenses.
Co-termination vs. Per-device: Expiration Date
With both licensing models, you have the choice between 1, 3, 5, 7, and 10-year licenses. (One-day licenses are also available with the per-device model.)
If you are licensing your devices individually (per device), this means the license expiration date is exactly how long of a term you choose. For example, if you purchase a Meraki switch with a 5-year license, you’ll need to renew your license 5 years from the day you activate the license.
With co-termination, however, expiration dates are configured differently.
The expiration date of all of your licenses is calculated based on a weighted average of all the licenses associated with your organization.
This formula takes into account the length of licenses, the license type (switch, camera, access point, or firewall), and the number of licenses.
It will look different for each business based on which devices you have.
In general, however, it means you can continue to extend your license renewal date by purchasing new devices. For many businesses, they can go years without needing to renew licenses through co-termination licensing.
Co-termination vs. Per-device: Past Due Licenses
Current Meraki licenses are required in both models to keep the associated devices active.
Once you’ve reached the expiration date, both licenses have a 30-day grace period.
Meraki will continue to remind you your licenses are past due, but if you surpass the grace period, what happens depends on what licensing model you’re using.
If you co-term your licenses, on day 31 after your expiration date, all of your devices will stop working since the same expiration date applies to all Meraki devices in your environment.
With per-device licensing, on the other hand, only the individual or group of licenses will expire once the grace period has run out on your Meraki licensing.
Which License Is Right for You?
While licensing is required with Meraki devices, which model you choose is up to you.
Co-term licensing is for customers who want mostly want a generally hands-off approach and plan on purchasing future Meraki gear, which will extend their licenses.
Per-device licensing, on the other hand, requires more interactive management. But, if you want a Cisco Umbrella integration, more leeway with activation time, and to spread out license renewals over time, you should consider this option.
If you have more questions about Meraki’s licensing models and which one would be right for you, download this free FAQ document from Meraki.
