Help - Meru Site with high density usage

[Steveduk]

Hi all,

 

Is there anybody using Meru successfully with a density of about 30 clients per room? This needs to be in a typical school setup so adjacent rooms could also have 30 clients.

 

If you are, please let me know and I'll contact you directly for more info.

 

Thanks

 

[twin--turbo]

We have and we found that if users had big profiles then things slow to a crawl.

 

We also found that a machine built from a rehashed image of another machine caused problems when lots of users logged on at the same time.

 

Rob

[Steveduk]

We have and we found that if users had big profiles then things slow to a crawl.

 

We also found that a machine built from a rehashed image of another machine caused problems when lots of users logged on at the same time.

 

Rob

 

Hi Rob,

 

Most of our devices are user owned & authenticate with RADIUS and then it's just Internet traffic - Google apps etc. Our domain devices which have a profile are less than 2MB.

 

What's the most devices you have successfully connected to an AP? Also, what model AP?

 

Thanks

 

Steve

[twin--turbo]

320I's

 

30 Users login at once. We have 60 Devices but not tested that far as yet, these are fattops.

 

On our other site we use thintops and can have 60 out in an area with no issue,

 

However they could be on differing AP's.

 

Meru are usualy very persistent and helpful on support cases..

 

Rob

[Steveduk]

320I's

 

30 Users login at once. We have 60 Devices but not tested that far as yet, these are fattops.

 

On our other site we use thintops and can have 60 out in an area with no issue,

 

However they could be on differing AP's.

 

Meru are usualy very persistent and helpful on support cases..

 

Rob

 

If you get chance would you be able to have a look to see what the max clients are on an AP when it's busy?

 

Thanks

Steve

[mhowell]

Steveduk, apologies for not picking this up sooner

Hi there, if there's a problem, please let me know [email protected] and we'll help you through any issues.

There's so many factors that could affect login times, no one site is the same. Common issues are large (unrealistic sized) profiles, power save settings on the client devices, poor chipsets i.e. single stream single band, or potentially a poorly configured system.

Either way we can help so drop me an email with what the issues are, as specific as you can be.

Many thanks

Mark

[ful56_uk]

Hi

 

Have a look at the device drivers, we found that an older intel wireless driver was causing some problems with a set of our laptops. We updated them and set the n channel to auto instead of 20mhz on the driver an noticed a massive improvement straight away.

[Steveduk]

Hi all,

 

Profile=2MB but not used for most users as they are BYOD

Mixed chipsets with the latest drivers (we noticed throughput & connectivity improvements when updating but this was with individual devices)

Changed Windows power settings (Meru instruction. No mean task to do twice on 1000 devices)

Latest Meru firmware on controller and APs (Meru instruction and have tried several)

Changed channel (Meru instruction)

Turned off virtual cell (Meru instruction)

 

Mark - You did pick this up at the end of August. It's an ongoing issue since April and I'll reply to you privately.

 

Thanks everyone

Steve

[psydii]

Here's a question... is the performance issue repeatable WITHOUT any staff or students nearby?

 

Also are any of the stations 'b' class devices? They have a really ugly impact on performance within the interference domain.

[slice]

We have approx 150 school owned laptops plus recently purchased class sets of iPads. Its the norm for 30 devices to be used in a classroom for any given lesson. Students have mandatory profiles (3.8Mb) and we regulary see all 30 devices login within 60-90seconds. Since opening access for BYOD devices two years ago we probably average 400 devices connected all day every day.

I am aware of one local school who initially had some connectivity problems which was related to crappy NIC's on low end netbooks but as i understand an updated driver resolved this. We have a mix of AP311's and 320's using a 3000 series controller.

Hope this is the kind of info you require, seams really unusual that you are having problems, my experience of Meru to date has been excellent.

Feel free to come back to me if you require more detail.

[TheTechieUK]

with regards to the above post by "Slice" please find a related video Edited November 23, 2012 by TheTechieUK
Being awesome and speaking the truth

[CyberNerd]

with regards to the above post by "Slice" please find a related video

 

It's not B*****t. Actually sounds remarkably similar to our site. 500 User owned devices with very little issue. Slightly less that 30 connections per AP. no login problems (no active directory either!!).

All the issues have been to do with out of date drivers esp Centrio N's or blackberry. Again Meru have been very supportive and recommended excellent engineers who have fixed any issues that we have had.

[Steveduk]

We have approx 150 school owned laptops plus recently purchased class sets of iPads. Its the norm for 30 devices to be used in a classroom for any given lesson. Students have mandatory profiles (3.8Mb) and we regulary see all 30 devices login within 60-90seconds. Since opening access for BYOD devices two years ago we probably average 400 devices connected all day every day.

I am aware of one local school who initially had some connectivity problems which was related to crappy NIC's on low end netbooks but as i understand an updated driver resolved this. We have a mix of AP311's and 320's using a 3000 series controller.

Hope this is the kind of info you require, seams really unusual that you are having problems, my experience of Meru to date has been excellent.

Feel free to come back to me if you require more detail.

 

Thanks for the info Slice.

How many APs do you have covering each location with 30 devices in?

[Steveduk]

Here's a question... is the performance issue repeatable WITHOUT any staff or students nearby?

 

Also are any of the stations 'b' class devices? They have a really ugly impact on performance within the interference domain.

 

 

Some of the clients will be B/G. We have always allowed BYOD which includes all sorts of clients iPod, BB, Android etc. We have over 1000 clients which averages out at about 400 connected during the day. Overall throughput is relatively low as most of the traffic is Internet based and goes through a 100Mbps connection. I'd be happy going back to working B/G but it would then seem a bit daft paying for top spec N kit!

 

We've got Meru (who have gone out of their way to try and sort this) coming in next week so hopefully we'll get to the bottom of the problem.

 

Cheers

Steve

[Steveduk]

It's not B*****t. Actually sounds remarkably similar to our site. 500 User owned devices with very little issue. Slightly less that 30 connections per AP. no login problems (no active directory either!!).

All the issues have been to do with out of date drivers esp Centrio N's or blackberry. Again Meru have been very supportive and recommended excellent engineers who have fixed any issues that we have had.

 

Could you let me know what BBs you had problems with?

 

Thanks

Steve

[CyberNerd]

Could you let me know what BBs you had problems with?

 

Thanks

Steve

 

All tablets we tried. We followed advice from meru and no problems since.

 

What's the issues you are having? It sounds like you have direct support from meru if you want it. I suspect its an infrastructure problem if you can't get enough devices per ap. How's your subnets set up? Do you have gig links to each ap? How many ap's go to each switch? Can the switches actually handle that traffic?

Edited November 23, 2012 by CyberNerd

[Steveduk]

All tablets we tried. We followed advice from meru and no problems since.

 

What's the issues you are having? It sounds like you have direct support from meru if you want it. I suspect its an infrastructure problem if you can't get enough devices per ap. How's your subnets set up? Do you have gig links to each ap? How many ap's go to each switch? Can the switches actually handle that traffic?

 

Hi Cyber, we've got Meru coming in to take a look tomorrow.

 

I'm happy the infrastructure is fine - everything else is ok, throughput is never an issue. No routing issues or unexplained packet loss - a very basic network compared to ones I have worked on in the past. Everything pro-actively monitored and 288Gbps backplane capacity on each switch with 40Gbps interlinks.

 

I'll let you know how we get on.

 

Thanks

 

Steve