Network Management

Hi

I appreciate this is a rather detailed post but really looking some guidance.

Current infrastructure is Cisco ASA devices with Cisco switches then Aruba os mobility controllers across multiple sites running campus aps.  These are managed by mobility master and we also use airwave for monitoring and reporting.

We had been looking at implementing Aruba central and sd branch.  However the more I dig in the less I think we need an SD wan solution.

All remote sites only require internet access to cloud apps and 365.  We have a small amount of on premise kit at our HQ.  Traffic does not need to come back to HQ just break out to the internet therefore we have been looking at solutions such as zscaler.

My questions are:

1. Can we make better use of airwave to deploy and manage controllers/aps/switches to remote sites with a ZTP kind of solution ? 

2. Would we be better to go down the route of IAPs on small sites and manage these through airwave rather than controllers and campus APs through mobility master?

For what I have explained above what would be the best kind of solution to still give control and security over our ever growing network which is spreading across various countries.

Thanks

Scott

Scott,

I'll take a dig at point1:

Currently AirWave do not have an option to manage AOS 8.x. Management of MD's and AP's have to be done through MM. For switches, yes, they can be deployed using ZTP through AirWave similar to IAP's and additionally there's cofig snippets option to manage any specific config for switches. 

for point 2: I would leave it to others for their suggestions and suggest to work with your trusted Aruba accounts team for best practices.

I'll give point 2 a try:

For small sites (130 of ours are 16 or so iAP each) I would definitely go iAP and manage them with Airwave. In fact we're converting our warehouses to iAP (5 at 100-120 iAP each)

To put that in some context, we are not using Aruba for edge security, the wireless access infrastructure is entireley inside. If I was trying to secure Internet edge, I would go back to MM/MC for the policy enforcement.

Is it possible to manage APs on a remote site over airwave if you have airwave on an external IP?

I should have clarified:

We have most sites on MPLS or VPN and the iAP clusters are on-net.

For a handful of sites, we use an MC in our datacenter and the iAP clusters tunnel back to the MC for on-net data, and we managem those clusters from Airwave.

I suppose you could expose the Airwave server to the Internet and let outside clusters connect, but that's more risk than we're willing to take on.