I am trying to find the best way to start investigating the ugprade to OS 8 without messing with my production environment. We just purchased a mobilty master but i dont have a spare controller sitting around that i can terminate ap's to for testing. To try and keep costs low, i was looking at what my options are. The cheapest virtual appliance seems to run in the neighborhood of $4K, which seems higher then i woud like for just testing stuff. I had never actually looked at them before because it was not something that we needed, but i started looking at the branch controllers. The 7005 is much cheaper and would seemingly meet my needs.
The question is, are the branch controllers just like the regular 7200 series where i can have the 7005 as a local controller managed by the mobility master? If all i want to do is get the configure made on the mobility master so i can test clearpass and get things working before i start migrating my production 7210's to the new system, is there any reason i cant use a 7005 controller?
is there any other advice for setting a dev environment that other people are doing? I know vmware has the vmug advantage program where you can get cheap licenses for lab stuff. It would be great to have something like that for aruba with all the virtual stuff.