Wireless Access

Hello,

My organization is broken up into multiple regions. Each region has its own IT staff that is in charge of their own systems. Last year, one of our regions decided to upgrade from their Aruba 2400 controller to a 3600 and give my region their old 2400. The decision was made to tether our controller to theirs over the WAN in a Master/Local configuration (they are the master). So, we purchased 50 AP-105's and set everything up here with our 2400.

As I said earlier, each controller is managed by a different group. Our profiles, authentication methods, IDS policies, etc, etc are all different. As far as I can tell, we're not sharing anything. But I'm not exactly an Aruba or WLAN expert.

Recently, we purchased Airwave. I am currently in the process of setting it up. I see in the user guide that trying to manage my server in Airwave while not managing the master controller as well is a no-no, so I'm faced with the decision of either pulling the master controller into Airwave (might not have enough licenses for that) or removing the Master-Local configuration and just making our controller it's own master. 

Given that each controller is under different administrative control, am I really giving up any benefits if I break up the Master-Local configuration? This would be my preferred choice, since most of the time when I need to configure my controller, I have to do it through the master - so I worry about messing up their WLAN accidentally.

If we decide to pull the master controller into Airwave, then the Airwave management traffic will be traversing the WAN constantly (45Mb). I realize this isn't the Airwave forum, but I figured I'd throw this part in just in case anyone knows. Would the management traffic typically cause any congestion problems on a T3, or is it pretty minimal?

I'm trying to convince management that breaking up the master/local configuration is the best choice, but they are hesitant because they like the idea of the regions sharing policies (even though that's not really what's happening). Wasn't the master/local configuration pretty much designed to be implemented in environments where all of the controllers are under one administrative entity? I just don't see the benefit in my situation.

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

Break them apart.  The first rule of master/local is make them both masters (turn the local into a master) when they are under different administrative domains.  

You are correct.

Thanks for your help, cjoseph.