Wireless Access

I have a 7240 controller pair which happily serves about 700 residence AP's, all pointed at the controller-ip.  

 

I need to bring up a new residence which does not have direct fibre access to the controllers.The easiest solution for me is to use a second controller port, VLAN, and IP address to route these AP's.

 

Assuming I add the correct static routing, will this work, or will the controller try to use the controller-ip to communicate anyway?

Your AP don't (and probably shouldn't) be routed/switched off the controller.

Will the new building be reputable into your core to reach your controller?

Some more design details...

 

The existing resnet consists of 9 wiring closets which all have home run fibre to the core MDF room.  These terminate on an S3500 stack, which does the routing, and also terminates the controller and the firewall.  Nice, neat, and self contained.  There is a connection between the campus core and the S3500, but it's only used for administrative trafffic and is locked down to specific machines.

 

The new residence is a partial conversion of an existing off-campu academic building, so the AP's there will have to come through the campus network to the core. 

 

What I'm trying to do is keep the AP traffic off my administrative link by giving them a different IP to point to and an alternate connection from the core to the controller to use.

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@Andrew Bell wrote:

I have a 7240 controller pair which happily serves about 700 residence AP's, all pointed at the controller-ip.  

 

I need to bring up a new residence which does not have direct fibre access to the controllers.The easiest solution for me is to use a second controller port, VLAN, and IP address to route these AP's.

 

Assuming I add the correct static routing, will this work, or will the controller try to use the controller-ip to communicate anyway?

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Even if the AP discovers the controller on one of its other interfaces, the AP will always be redirected to the controller-ip.

AHA!  It's a plot to make me buy more controllers. :)

 

Thanks folks.

Nevermind, it's not a technical limitation but an administrative descision. There's nothing wrong with allowing the APs to talk over any network to reach the existing controller-ip. User traffic would be tunneled (either GRE or IPSec depending on config). But up to you, if it's worth it to keep that segmentation in place, your best bet would be a second controller as a local. Up to you though.

I was being facetious about new controller plot. :)

 

Yes, it's an administrative issue. As far as the dorms are concerned, we're the ISP, so the ideal situation is to have zero shared infrastructure. For the sake of 30 overflow beds, I can live with it though.