B@AP or B@EWC to save on large spanned subnets conundrum

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Opening this topic up for some advise, and see what others may have done.

Its good practise to building networks without large broadcast domains, so typically keeping say a /24 subnet per stack for Data and Voice. Where I'm coming unstuck is if I have a large building, with multiple stacks I wouldn't therefore wont to have the same VLAN for wireless spanned across all those switches.

I would need this though, so that any APs configured for B@AP, wireless devices keep their IP address as they roams around the campus.

The fix for this is to B@EWC, and create a topology group - which would certainly address the problem.

The conundrum I have is that when creating large networks, and large wireless networks you would need to move into bridging all traffic back to the controller which works in reverse to the contrary of what you would want to do in this situation and bridge traffic directly out of the AP.

Perhaps bridging all traffic on large to very large networks is perfectly fine, so long as you have high availability controllers and distribute the load, maybe even add further controllers in a mobility group?

So just wanted to get peoples opinion on it, and hear about what others have done on large deployments like this.

Many thanks in advance

[Craig_Guilmette]

Hello Martin

That is a valid question and not one I have an answer for. I will say most of our customers using V2110 controllers with Guest access using the second port are working OK with a single GIG port. There are so many factors like how many AP's do both radios on each AP offer the guest SSID if so we have 2 users data per AP times the number of AP's and then what are they doing? Streaming 4K video streams or checking email once every 5 minutes. You get my point right? The only real way to check is use EMC and look at the port utilization of that port at the highest peak usage of that Guest wlan service. I know it wasn't the answer you wanted but it is the truth. Only the port utilization is the limiting factor.

[Anonymous]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for posting. Chicken and egg problem then really, as I would want to know what to do beforehand, but that is still useful information to know.

Using your theory I wonder if I could look at this from the point of view of current installations, taking a rough guesstimate of the port utilisation of current APs instead, seeing as I don't have a list of installations, of varying sizes, all bridging traffic at the controller.

If I get a rough estimate as to what the AP port utilisation is in different scenarios, I could theoretically scale that up depending on how big the installation is.

What do you reckon?

[Anonymous]

Have one additional question regarding this. Most of the time I might be installing the V2110 controller which supports up to 1,050 APs.

Quite often the deployment will involve a Guest wireless that is often bridged directly out of the second Ethernet port, with a bridge at controller topology as a means of completely segregating internal and guest traffic.

So the problem I have is that I then would essentially be stuck with a single 1Gb port, I'm not aware you can add more ports or 10Gb ports?

This probably means if I want to start bridging all wireless traffic to the controller I would need to move to a physical appliance that has 10Gb ports, like the C5210.

In your opinion, when do you think that transition to 10Gb capable controller would need to happen?

I know thats a very open ended question, and it depends on what the wireless is being used for... but even as a rough guide perhaps broken down to light, moderate and heavy wireless usage, as the following as an example:

• Light: Basic email and web browsing.

• Moderate: Moderate use with some audio streaming, video streaming, file downloads Cloud-based applications, and VoIP.

• Heavy: Large file downloads (high volume), video and web conferencing

What do you think?

Thanks

[James_A]

The V2110 uses vmxnet3 for esa0 and esa1, which is a 10Gb interface. So as long as your VM hosts have 10Gb you'll be fine.