Wireless Access

I need an advice for the following:

We are going to manage retail stores with Aruba iaps. We use our Airwave server and I am struggling to get info about Groups and Folders - how to manage them correctly after rolling out all stores.

It is one retailer, with stores across europe. In all stores same SSID's will be present. Each store will have 1-2 IAP's - and thus each store will have one VC.

Should we create one Group called Retailer X with several Folders - each folder represents a Store in a country. Or does that affect all VC's and thus causing problems? 

Or is best way to create for every store a new Group?

Thanks in advance.

In Airwave, Groups are used for configuration.  Folders are heirarchical, and those are used when you have a Site> Campus> City> Country relationship.  Folders are mostly used for reporting and viewing statistics.  It allows you to look at a global view, and then drill into APs, Users, Down devices geographically.

Theoretically if the configuration is exactly the same at each site, you could use the exact same group for all, because the configuration of a device is tied to a group.  

The big question is, are you using Airwave to manage multiple retailers?  If yes, of course at minimum each retailer would have an individual group each (store configuration), and each retailer would have a heirarchy of folders depending on how you group their locations.

Please look at the Instant VRD here:  http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Validated-Reference-Design/Aruba-Instant-Validated-Reference-Design/ta-p/258782  for strategies on deploying IAPs for different locations.

Hi Colin, thanks for the response.

We are managing multiple customers (mostly offices with only one location). They are all separated by a Group, and they have each a folder called Access Points.

Now this is first retailer, more to come. Thus your advice is to create for each Retail X store a Group, with one Folder named Access Points. If Retail Z comes up, we go on using different Groups per store location.

Note: let's say all US Stores use same SSID/WPA2Keys and RF settings, we could add to Retail X US Stores, and create  Folder hierarchy for each store in each City. This makes it happen that e.g. 10 VC's are in one same Group. Does this cause any problems?