It's exactly what the text says. Bridge mode is deprecated on campus APs with controllers and above 32 in a roaming domain unsupported, which has to do with the scaling of the synchronization between the APs. If you are on tunneled mode, there is no issue. The situation has not changed between 6.5 and 8.x, bridging is deprecated on either version and more than 32 APs in a roaming domain that it's not supported, also is the same (it may not be fully documented, but it's like that as long as I can remember).
Unsupported does not necessarily means that it does not work, but because campus APs and controllers were designed for tunneled traffic, and there has been hard to solve TAC cases, this is how it's written down. For bridge mode, Instant APs or AOS10 is designed for that and the better choice.
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Herman Robers
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If you have urgent issues, always contact your Aruba partner, distributor, or Aruba TAC Support. Check
https://www.arubanetworks.com/support-services/contact-support/ for how to contact Aruba TAC. Any opinions expressed here are solely my own and not necessarily that of Hewlett Packard Enterprise or Aruba Networks.
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Original Message:
Sent: Aug 30, 2024 10:53 AM
From: Ronin101
Subject: APs with bridge mode SSID - 32 APs or more
Dear Experts,
Customer is running VMM and 7205 controllers. They are using bridge mode SSIDs currently in 6.5. They have approx 50+ APs at each site and they are using it for past 4-5 years without any problem. Now when they are upgrading to v8, there seems to be some confusion. According to userguide of 8.10 pg 876 its mentioned
Understanding Bridge Mode Mobility Deployments
In bridge mode deployments, it is possible to deploy more than one AP in a single location. Therefore, APs in bridge forwarding mode support firewall session synchronization, which allows clients to retain their current session and IP address as they roam between different bridge mode APs on the same Layer-2 network. The bridge mode mobility feature facilitates client mobility on up to 32 Layer-2 connected APs by allowing the APs to communicate and share the user state as the user roams from AP to AP. This mechanism is always enabled when an AP is set to bridge mode, and it requires that all APs be on the same Layer-2 segment where roaming will occur.
Does it mean that if we configure bridge mode SSIDs in a cluster configuration, we still are limited to only 32 APs? as per TAC response there is no such limitation. Then what exactly above text is referring to?