Site to Site VPN between Cisco Meraki and PA3250

[Andre.Tsoy]

Hi all,

I am having trouble establishing a tunnel between our PA and a Meraki MX with the dynamic IP.

By trial and error, I was able to establish phase 1 by specifying Meraki's FQDN as "Peer Address" and Peer ID as it's local IP (can be found under the Uplink menu of the Meraki). Just so you know, Meraki MX will always use the "local IP" as it's local ID.

For some strange reason, I cannot get Phase 1 to work with the "Dynamic Peer IP Address Type". PA support was not able to provide any useful information regarding this. This is very disappointing. I was expecting better support from a "premier" firewall vendor.

As for Phase 2, it does not even initiate.

If anyone was successful in getting the site to site VPN to work between these devices, please share your resolution.

Thanks

[MP18]

@Andre.Tsoy 

I found below link how to establish connection with Cisco Meraki.

https://blog.fuelusergroup.org/how-to-build-an-ipsec-tunnel-between-a-palo-alto-firewall-and-a-cisco...

Below is link how to setup Tunnel when other side has dynamic IP.

https://knowledgebase.paloaltonetworks.com/KCSArticleDetail?id=kA10g000000ClIGCA0

Regards

[Andre.Tsoy]

Thanks for a quick response. That helped a bit!

So I got both phases up now, since the PA is in passive-mode i had to initiate the traffic from the Meraki - that's when Phase 2 came up.

I am facing a different problem now. After speaking with Meraki support, they advised that ESP is not establishing... the Meraki is sending it to PA but does not hear anything back.

Do you have any ideas why?

Thanks

[Andre.Tsoy · Accepted solution]

FYI.

I got this resolved, finally! With the help from a PA tech guy who actually knew his way around VPNs 🙂

So here are some gotachas:

1. The Meraki MX was behind an ISP router that was handing out it's own private IPs.

1.2. This means that you have to enable NAT-T on the PA side. IKE Gateway > Advanced Options > check Enable NAT Traversal

2. Meraki MX does not allow you to specify a Local ID, by default it is using an WAN IP address found in the "Uplink" menu of the firewall.

2.1 IKEv2 allows you to enter the "Local ID", but it did not take affect for some reason. The Meraki was still sending it's "WAN IP" as the local ID.

Everything is working now! 

[pshingavi]

We encountered the same issue as you -- phase 1 would come up, but the meraki would refuse to proceed to phase 2.  We got this working by adding proxy ids to our ipsec tunnel configuration on the palo alto.  Once the proxy ids with the mapped subnets was in place, we were good to go.