Controllerless Networks

 Hello,

I'd like to get some feedback from the community.. I think the general consensus is that single large VLANs seem to be preferred over VLAN pooling (as far as controllers go) but I'm wondering if the same applies to instants..

I'm doing a small deployment for a local coffee shop which sees a very heavy amount of wireless usage. I'm consdiering a /21 for the space with 4-hour lease times. The deployment will consist of an EdgeRouter-4 and (4) IAP-315's. I think this should be sufficient horsepower to handle all of the DHCP and DNS Proxy requests.

My question is, would I be better off going with 4 x /23's, configured as VLAN pools?

I'm planning on running with broadcast filtering all (since clients don't need to communicate with one another) and enabling DMO.

Can someone with more experience validate my logic? Should I go with VLAN pools or a big subnet? Is there anything I'm missing?

Thanks in advance!

When you say "heavy" do you mean alot of traffic or alot of unique users?  If it is alot of traffic, you probably do not need a /21.

How many people do you expect at that coffee shop at the same time?  Your lease times should probably be significantly less, like maybe 15 or 30 minutes, because the majority of people could be drive-bys and you don't want those people consuming ip addresses.  A single VLAN will not be a problem with broadcast filtering ARP.

DMO is only for organizations that expect to be delivering multicasts to users.

"Heavy" traffic meaning a lot of unique users with a small number of those consuming a lot of bandwidth.. Coffee shop is two floors and a lot of customers stay for 3 hours or more. There's outlets everywhere so it doubles as a very student friendly study space. Peak usage sees around ~200 people with pretty high turnover.

I was thinking of long lease times as I don't want users interrupted at all on DHCP renews.

Also what's the prevailing logic around broadcast filtering in this case? All or ARP? Seems like ARP is the better way to go?

For Instant ARP offers more broadcast filtering.