Riddle me this, my Wi-FI homeys: What’s missing from today’s cloud-based WLAN paradigm?
I actually (kinda) like my controllers these days. And I like that a single VLAN is all I need to each AP in my CAPWAP world. But, I still yearn for cloud control over the whole thing (sorry, PI- and every other bloated management framework). Here’s how I see it, at my Network Computing blog.
And, as a thank-you for stopping by, here’s a picture of Blue Mountain Lake. We’re all about value here at wirednot.
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Well, check out Moto’s VX9000: one can have their big box with “single pane of glass” in the cloud if they want to, but will retain all of their current controller and AP investment (everything supported by WING5 released in 2010 is supported). Then one can mix and match controller and controllerless sites with ease.
Same on the management side. I’m showing in the trainings how one can do 0-touch site deployments with WING5, and minimize the amount of config objects (and related management overhead) with overrides (applied on multiple layers) and wildcards: “Assign site profile that matches chars 3-8 of the DNS suffix, use standard WLAN profiles but pull the actual SSID/PSK/VLAN/admin status/etc from the site profile”. This also includes ACL overrides, allowing ACLs like “allow [from] $GUEST-NET [to] $AAA-SERVERS [type] $AAA-TRAFFIC” – one human-readable line that replaces multiple rules and may have overrides per site (or on other levels). How do you like that?
Plus, WING5 supports very flexible tunneling, so you don’t need “to perform hundreds of thousands of VLAN-related switch configuration steps and do things I’d really rather not do with Layer 2.” You can get a number of overlay L2/L3 tunnels between any two WING5 devices regardless of how they’re connected to the network, and tunnel L2/L3 over them in turn (L2 over L3 is also supported). Failover included.
Just to be fair, Moto is not the only one offering such features (not sure about offering ALL of those features, but then, I’m not in the Sales Department). On the other hand, Cisco’s CAPWAP tunneling is a relict most other vendors buried ages ago. Even Aruba started hedging via Instant (but many features are still only available on controllers). Being stuck with dinosaurs will make Cisco customers look like cavemen at some point – evolve! 🙂