Wireless Access

Customer has a single site and a small office currently needing about four Aruba APs.

I think the 7005 controller (JW634A) is appropriate because it has some potential for future growth.  I intend to manage the WLAN locally and not using any cloud subscription service.

What license(s) are required to enable the 7005 controller to support four Aruba APs?

If there are other, optional licenses available, what are they and what additional capabilities would they provide given the environment described above?

Thanks in advance!

Generally for APs, supporting user roles, and enabling RF security, people mostly go with an AP, PEF, and RFProtect for each AP. See the following link for more license details: https://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_80_Web_Help/Content/LicenseGuide/License_Usage.htm 

Agree with Dustin,

• Required is the AP capacity license per AP.
• Recommended is the Policy Enforcement Firewall (PEF-NG) licence per AP. Required for custom role/acls and required when having a captive-portal for the dns-redirection through a role.
• Optional/Recommended RF-Protect for Rogue Containment, Spectrum Analyze. 

But for 4 AP you don't really need a controller. When you have instant/unify accesspoint you can run a virtual controller inside the APs itself, managed locally, with airwave on-premise or cloud central cloudbased. Cloud central will be a excellent choice for flexibility and central management and easy manage different sites.

For a instant managed cluster you only need a airwave device licence or cloud central subsciption per AP. No additional licences are needed. A instant virtual cluster have almost equal possibilities as controller based.

In a instant cluster there isn't a real limit for max. access points anymore (far as i known), but speaking from design perspective you will size not bigger than approx. 100 access points in a virtual cluster. All access points in the virtual cluster need be managed in the same layer 2 domain (vlan).

Controller-based or Controller-less are both excellent choices, it's up to you where you find most comfortable with. But known you have some options here and you can possible save some money.

Thanks for all of the information. 

I am already very familiar with Instant AP and most of my Aruba wireless projects to date use that technology.   There are two drawbacks that I've found with that approach:

1) the cost per IAP (Instant AP) is considerably higher than the cost of the corresponding AP (controller-based AP) to the point that IAP is only cost-effective in small deployments.  In larger deployments, controller-based is actually less expensive in total.

2) There aren't any Instant options for the higher-end APs.  Aruba appears to limit IAP to the more basic devices.  For example, I haven't found any 500-series Instant access points yet.

That's why I've settled on a controller-based approach for the current project:  I need State-of-the-Art APs supporting the latest Wi-Fi protocols and the only way to get that result appears to be using a controller-based AP like the AP-505.  For this particular project, the cost of the controller is negligible.

Am I missing something here?  Is there a controller-less cloud-based solution that works with advanced APs like the AP-505?  If so, I would sincerely appreciate any enlightenment you can provide.

Thanks again!

1) IAP and AP are the same list price.

2) The AP-500 series are not called instant anymore, they call "UniFied AP" now and all models can run in a controller based our instant based cluster.

Sure, AP-505 Unified and can be used in a instant cluster. Minimum ArubaOS instant firmware must be 8.6.0.0.

See also the datasheet for information: 

https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/ds/DS_AP500Series.pdf

Thanks for that info.  I had no idea that HPE/Aruba had consolidated new APs so they can run as controller-based or using an Instant cluster.

That leaves one last question and I'll call this issue solved:

Can I really just order four Q9H63A Aruba AP-515 (US) Dual Radio 4x4:4 + 2x2:2 802.11ax Internal Antennas Unified Campus AP

and create an Instant cluster without any additional licensing or cloud subscriptions?

If that is true, that's the solution.

Thanks again!

Thats correct,

The AP-505 runs ArubaOS instant 8.6.0.0 and can managed locally from the master AP, there are no any additional licence needed.

For central managed you can use Airwave on-premise, then you need one Airwave device licence per AP.

For central managed from the cloud, you need a Aruba Central device subsciption.

Excellent info and thank you for bringing me up to speed!

Thanks for the concise answer!  Much appreciated!