Wireless Access

Hi experts,

I have to implement a wireless network for a High School. Clients are students which connect to the wireless network through Guest captive portal. The network consists of ClearPass and one controller, and of course many APs. At this first stage the customer only will purchase one controller, and in the second stage will purchase another one in order to have controller redundancy.
All this said, for this first stage the customer also wants to have some type of reliability in the way if the controller goes down, clients already authenticated keep their connection up, although new clients will not be able to authenticate.
In the first moment I thought to use bridge mode for this, but I can't since bridge mode doesn't support captive portal. Then I will have to use tunnel mode, but then if the controller goes down, all the APs and clients will go down. Is there anyway to achieve this kind of reliability with just one controller? Any help will be much appreciated...

Regards,
Julián

The model is to deploy a second controller for redundancy, or open a TAC case and have another one sent overnight. The pricing is designed so that redundancy is cost effective for a second controller. Controllers have no moving parts and rarely fail. If you want to plan for that scenario you should have a second controller. Nothing was built to account for the failure of a single controller besides a second controller.

The required functionality is only possible by adding a controller as an Aruba solution.
Provides additional controller to provide service

Thanks guys,

Then I will go for Instant.

Regards,
Julián

Instant has been our answer for this kind of reliability when in a single controller or non-controller environment.  

 

We've been very happy with it.  

 

The Captive Portal in Instant isn't a rich-media splash page, but it should get you through Phase 1 until you can stand up your second controller and transition to the controllers CP. 

(Alternatively, you could look at ClearPass Guest for your splash page. It looks quite a bit better than the Instant CP, but I believe there are $ attached.)

Hi KB_Z,

 

Yes, I have seen the Instant captive portal and doesn't look like very good, but fortunately my customer has purchased ClearPass. I am going to implement many clusters of IAPs. Do you know if ClearPass supports many clusters of IAPs? I almost sure it does, but not 100% sure.

 

Regards,

Julián

ClearPass will support many IAP clusters, using either the same captive portal page across all the clusters, or using multiple captive portal pages.