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Aruba central access point groups

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  • 1.  Aruba central access point groups

    Posted Feb 27, 2023 07:00 PM

    I have two different AP models that need different power settings 

    I have some AP 567 in our warehouse that are 40 feet in the air.

    I also have a few AP 515's in our office 

    They both broadcast the same ssids and they are on the same subnet.

    Is it possible to have two groups for those devices?  I need to turn the power down on the 515's.

    Aruba states that the groups need to be different subnets.  The online documentation doesn't mention this.  

    When I try to move them from one group to another they will all end up moving following the vc.

    For there not to be a way to handle this seems ridiculous to me.  

    Any ideas?



  • 2.  RE: Aruba central access point groups

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Feb 27, 2023 09:12 PM

    you should be able to set it on per AP basis.



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  • 3.  RE: Aruba central access point groups

    Posted Feb 28, 2023 07:16 AM

    Thanks, I did see that option when I was configuring my AP's but I don't see this as a viable solution.  I don't know what channel is best and it ends up creating more administration then I would like.


    Does anyone have different groups setup on the same subnet?  I would think you could set the name of the VC for a group, then set the VC name on the AP so it knows what group to be assigned.

    So far I have not been impressed with Central.




  • 4.  RE: Aruba central access point groups
    Best Answer

    Posted Feb 28, 2023 12:04 PM

    If you need to customize radio power you may want to look at RF Zones

     

    Rf Zones | Aruba Central (arubanetworks.com)

     

    You create multiple RF zone profiles with your manual power settings and then assign the zone to each AP that you want to manually control.

     

    However you may not have to do that.  Aruba is much better at automatically assigning channels and power settings than the previous solutions we used in the past.  I used to have to review blueprints and monitor ap metrics to manually tweak power settings and channels.  After we migrated to Aruba the Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) feature has been very good;  better than I was anyway.   I rarely have to change the automatic radio settings now. Also if neighboring APs mess with an existing radio plan ARM recalculates the optimal changes reconfigures automatically.

     

    I believe if you set the Max Transmit Power under the ARM settings, ARM will automatically determine the best RF environment you need for each AP without you having to do anything else yourself unless overridden ARM Overview (arubanetworks.com).  I find the default Max Transmit Power to be a little low for our environments.

     

    Be a little careful with assuming when the documentation says "groups" are all talking about the virtual cluster.  There are several types of "groups" for different features and they are not all Cluster dependent.  It is true you can only have one AP Cluster per layer 2 subnet.  We place the Cluster management traffic into a dedicated VLAN anyway so it is not much of a problem.  If you really really needed separate clusters to service the same client access subnet you could probably create separate cluster management vlans and tag client traffic for the same client access LAN on both clusters.  I believe you can also run a few APs or all of them in standalone mode, Cluster independent.  You can still manage them via Central but they are essentially standalone.  But if you are going in that direction you may want to think about it more carefully, and contact support.  You may be missing a simpler solution.

     






  • 5.  RE: Aruba central access point groups

    Posted Feb 28, 2023 03:42 PM

    This worked for what I was looking to do.  I am not sure why the Aruba tech did not mention this to me in the first place.

    Thanks for your assistance.




  • 6.  RE: Aruba central access point groups

    Posted Mar 25, 2023 09:05 AM

    Hello BM96,

    so, did you use one group/VC to for both of AP 515 & 567?

    I'm having the same issue with 3 different AP types (615,635 & 655), we're using the same L2 VLAN to manage all APs, and currently there's a VC in 615 group with 15 APs. Can I create another two groups for 635 & 655? if not, what's the suggested solution ?

    As you mentioned that Aruba support can't provide any helpful support I'm afraid.  

    Thanks




  • 7.  RE: Aruba central access point groups

    Posted Mar 27, 2023 09:00 AM

    Hi @ask74, what are you trying to achieve?If  it's to manipulate the power for each type of APs you can use the RF zones too.

    You can have 3 diferent groups as long as the APs are in different subnets

    I hope this helps