Wireless Access

Hi,

Due to the recent grow of our WiFi network, we are facing some infraestructure limiting issues and some doubts have arise. We currently have two redudant controllers (7200 running on 6.4.2.8), master-local with VRRP.

Currently we have two VLANs for the APs: VLAN A /25 (APs on master controller) and VLAN B /25 (APs on local controller), in case of each other failure or during upgrades, the APs are always avaiable on one of the controllers.

Due to network grown VLAN A is now insufficient to accomodate all the necessary APs and we would like to migrate to a cenario like this with the minimum possible operational impact:

VLAN A /24 (same IP addressing but different netmask)
VLAN B /24 (different IP addressing with different netmask)

Currently we have fixed IP on all the APs.

We also have a MESH network (20 APs on VLAN A).

We are aware that it's not a daily or simply move, but have you done it before and could you advise us the best practice or course to do it?

We also have airwave 8.0.8.1

Thanks in advance for all the information and help.

- Migrate to DHCP ip addresses for access points.  

What you are going through is the biggest reason for not having fixed ip addresses--the management overhead and the pain when you want to make changes.  Migrating to DHCP easily allows you to contract/expan subnets and the access points will reboot and adjust.

Hi Colin,

Thanks for you fast response and suggestion. Of course that DHCP has crossed our minds but we now have one mainly drawback: alarmistics.

We are using Airwave for monitoring the APs but we found that a lot of link failures (viewable throught ping failures between portals and points) on the MESH were not being seen by Airwave and we've moved to complementary alarmistics which rely on direct mapping of fixed IP <-> AP name. Throught this analisis we achived a much more stable MESH and together with Aruba fine tuned the configuration and we continue to use it.

Thanks once again.

Are you sending SNMP Traps from the controller to Airwave?  If you are, the controller should notify Airwave less than a minute when APs have lost contact with the controller.  This of course will not replace granular notifications of missed pings, etc.  

You could also give the access points longer lease times.

Lastly if you have someone who can program this, you could use the XML-API in Airwave to pull the latest ip addresses of access points, so that you can ping the IP address associated with the access point.  In Airwave the XML-API documentation is located under Documentation> Interfacing with AMP> State and Statistical API Documentation.

Yes we are sending the SNMP traps but we really need the granularity given by a simple alarmistic based on ping (we have a little more complex configuration than just send the alarm when one ping is missed).

Also we will take on account changing the DHCP lease time because at this point seems the feasible solution with me minor impact to the daily operation. Either way is there any massive command or using Ariwave device management to change the netmask on all the intended APs, which after that we would change de network config manually on the controllers and all the APs would come up?

For the last proposal we currently don't have anyone with the time avaiable to use the API, but thank you very much for sharing that possibility.

Understood.

Unfortunately, there is no command to change the netmask on all devices automatically.  You have to re-provision them manually through the controller.