Differences between Virtual WING Controller and appliance

[Andrea_Cavicchi]

Good morning,
there is a brief document that explains the differences and limitations using a VX9000 Controller compared with a solution using an NX appliance?

thank you,
Andrea

[Andrea_Cavicchi]

thanks to both, mine was a generic request, we usually have small-medium installations and only in rare cases we use the NX controller. Since we have no experience with VX9000, I wanted to have confirmation, as you said, that with VX9000 in the NOC (but without an appliance in the NOC), I cannot tunnel a VLAN traffic from the remote site to the NOC...


thank you,
Andrea

[ckelly]

Andrea,

Biggest difference is that there's no data plane on a VM (VX9000) controller. So if you need to tunnel WLANs back to the controller, that's not happening with a VX9000. Besides that, the different controllers are primarily about how many APs you need to manage. It just so happens that the LARGEST scaling controller is the VX9000.
Might seem silly, but there's absolutely no issue with even putting the smallest (NX5500) in the NOC to act as a distributed (centralized) deployment controller....or putting a VX9000 at a site to act as a local controller. Doesn't matter.

Tomasz did a good job of describing the other differences.

[Tomasz]

Hello Andrea,

I didn't see any publicly available, but if you told us do you want to compare with NX9600 or NX9610 we can sort it out in details I believe.
Main difference is, that VX9000 (and NX9600) are meant for centrallized deployments, so the controller is just for management plane, and all the rest is done locally at each site by so-called RFDM (RF Domain Manager), either one of the APs or an on-site controller, depending on scale. This also means, tunneling on these appliances is limited and no official support for tunneled (bridged at controller) WLANs compared to other appliances. VX9000 scales to 25,600 APs, NX to 10,240. There are also smaller differences between them.
NX9610 is the most capable as it gives you not only 10K AP scalability but also dataplane for tunneling.
NX7500 and NX5500 also have smaller scalability and some capabilities limited compared to NX96XX.

Hope that helps,
Tomasz