Wireless Access

I'm thinking about testing a Aruba wireless controller and setting it up with multiple mesh clusters using priority levels to provide mesh cluster recovery and redundancy. Are the mesh portals and mesh points for each cluster limited to 8 mesh points with a physical wireless controller? If multiple mesh clusters are set up, do I have to subnet and create additional VLANs for each cluster or can the clusters use the same subnet and VLAN?

Recommendation is no more than 6-8 points per portal. You can create as many mesh clusters as you like (there should be no functional limit). You can have them all share the same L2 backhaul/VLAN. Just watch out for loops.

Are the 6-8 mesh points per mesh portal a software limitation or a recommendation based on traffic requirements?

The AOS controller will let you go out to 64 nodes. 6-8 is the recommendation due to the basic math of how that many points can quickly erode the link rates.

Thanks for the information Jerrod. I appreciate it. It looks like the max number of hops is 32, default is 8, and the recommended number of hops from mesh AP to mesh portal is 2-3. Is there a recommended signal quality/signal value between the APs in a mesh deployment? Is there a recommended/minimum value for data throughput between any pair of mesh point-mesh point or mesh point-mesh portal?