Controllerless Networks

Hi,

 

We are in the process of deploying Wi-Fi to a large site and expect to require 50-60 AP's.   Money is tight and so we are looking to use Aruba Instant as we very much like the simple setup and management.

 

My only concern is the size of the network and number of AP's.  I know that technically there is no AP limit, but I would be interested to hear experiences from other people that have deployed similar size Aruba Instant networks.

 

Thanks

From what I understand Instant "clusters" are now limited by the broadcast domain more than any hard number. I have heard several times from ACE and other Aruba staff that 64 AP / VC was a reasonable design.

We've done an entire school district with just Instant. The largest sites have 67 and 53 APs. We've had great success with those. VLAN pooling has really helped.

Hi

 

Thanks for your feedback it's very useful.  Of those sites with 67 and 53 APs, is that amount per swarm ?

 

Are you using layer 3 roaming ?

How many clients do you have connected to 1 swarm on average per day, what sort of CPU utilization do you see on your VC AP with that kind of load ?

What model AP's are you using

 

Thanks

Not sure what you mean by "swarm". Do mean cluster? If so, then yes, it's one cluster.

 

We are not using L3 roaming since it's all one cluster per campus.

 

At the High Schools where the large clusters are we are averaging about 200+ users on the internal network. About 50-75 on the guest.

 

CPU usage has seemed surprisingly low. I seen APs with 40+ clients on avergae and the CPU was about 15%.

 

I really had my doubts, but Instant has really done well so far.

 

As the device count grows we may start employing VLAN pooling, but as it stands it has work well.