Aruba ION/Aruba Central deployments?

[SpaceInvader83]

Hi all,

 

Does anyone currently run sites with just a smidgen over 100+ AP's using instant on/aruba central? I'm looking to replace my wireless and one vendor has said said a controller is a must and another has said Aruba Central would be more than capable for what we need. Obviously Central works out cheaper for us , we are looking at mostly AP515's.

 

Any thoughts?

[supportman]

Personally I would run a controller with those, ours is around 50 AP's and we run off a controller.

[Norphy]

My MAT has both; we have an Aruba Mobility hierarchy with a Mobility Master and four Mobility Controllers underneath the Master. We also have Instant clusters in two of our primary schools where their WAN connections are relatively poor.

 

Officially, you can have up to 127 APs in an Instant cluster but depending the APs in the cluster and how powerful they are, you may get more. The amount of APs you can have on a controller depends on the controller but even the basic one in the 7200 range can handle up to 230-ish while the most powerful can handle thousands.

 

There are advantages to either approach but either way, with around 100 APs, you’re fine.

 

The major disadvantage to the Instant clusters (and any other controllerless solution for that matter) is that a lot of configuration is being pushed out to your edge switches as that is where the APs are breaking out onto the network. With a Mobility controller, your APs are tunnelling to the controller and breaking out onto your core switch. If you’ve got L3 routing on your edge switches, going controllerless means that roaming is that bit harder as you’re more likely to be changing IP address as you move from switch to switch, unless you set the AP to tunnel back to a VPN, by which time you may as well get a controller.

 

Going for an Aruba Mobility hierarchy gets you other features like:

 

Dynamic Segmentation which is basically 802.1x terminated on the controller

 

Remote APs, where they tunnel back to your controller over the internet and anything that connects to them are connected to your network without any configuration on the client

 

Airmatch, where the Master scans the airspace around your entire network and determines which RF channel each of your APs should be on for optimal performance.

 

However, if you have a single site, all of your VLANs are terminated on the core rather than the edge and you don’t care much about the features a controller gets you, the Instants will work perfectly.

 

I know you said that you’re already in contact with vendors but if I were you, I’d be talking to someone like European Electronique or SwitchShop, both of whom are HPE partners and will give you good advice about what the options are and what will work best for you.

Edited June 8, 2020 by Norphy

[SpaceInvader83]

Thanks so much for such a lengthy reply, gives me a good overview thank you. As others have recommended my next step will be getting a vendor agnostic survey done by lever and go from there, I've been pleasantly surprised by how competitively priced the Aruba AP's are.