Wireless Access

Hi,

we have around 80 storages where our employees have Zebra tablet computers for scanning and picking up goods from the shelves.

We are using Aruba 215/225 or Aruba 315 in most of the storages and in some new locations we have 305.
Currently we are moving the IAPs (215,225,315) to be controller based and the half is already done.
But sometimes the follwing happens: Employees call me up and tell me, that the tablets lose connections if they are moving around in the warehouse. (roaming problems?) This seems to be on the same spots but its hard to get correct information. In one special case, first we migrated the access points to be controller based instead of being instant.
This does not resolve any issues. So I changed some settings mentioned in best practices and so on. But this also does not change anything.
Last step was to bring up/add a new switch, plug all APs in this switch and voilà. Four weeks after changing I talked to the boss if the storage and he told me, that nobody conplained about being kicked out of the wireless again. I talked to hom to verify this but it seems to resolve the problem.

Does anybody know, why this could be the game changer?

The "old" switch is a Aruba 2530 48G POE+

The new switch is a Aruba 2540 48G POE+

Both are updated to one of the latest patches.

If the setup was Instant based and traffic was bridged locally, then the switches might have an impact in connectivity (maybe vlans were not trunked properly to all Instant AP ports). But since you moved to a controller based setup, the switches play a minimal role if your traffic is tunneled back to the controller. Switches might impact POE budget available to power up the APs, but both switches that you selected have similar POE budget so it is not the case..

Are you sure it is not an RF optimization that you did? Are you sure all APs were up before (no dead-spots)? If you had parallel setup in the same area (IAP and controller broadcasting same WLAN), then that might have been the issue in roaming..