One of the Cisco Customer "Darryl Turner" was having a discussion - Wireless LAN Controller Best Practices with a workmate regarding when and how many Wireless LAN controllers are needed when deploying an Enterprise WLAN. They had the question in their mind, Is there a document or link that shows the best practices on when to deploy and how many Wireless LAN Controllers should be deployed based on the amount of APs, sites, branches etc?
They were designing a WLAN for an organization that will have a central office and six remote sites within the WAN (bonded T1 connectivity). they were planning to start out with 25 APs at each site. A Wireless Guest network will be configured so non-employees have the option to authenticate to the WLAN at each site.
They also have planned for a Wireless LAN Controller at each site to streamline the deployment of AP's now and in the future. The workmate is arguing that he should just use two Wireless LAN Controllers and position these at the central office and all AP's will be centrally managed by these two controllers. His thought on this is that if all his sites have their own networks/VLANs. Also, with the need for Guest access at each site, He would want a Wireless LAN Controller to facilitate this mobility option within each site's LAN.
So Is there any documentation that he can consult for best practices on the deployement of Wireless LAN Controllers?
To answer to Darryl question, Leo shared one of the Cisco document - "Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) Configuration Best Practices".
- Wireless/RF
- Network Connectivity
- Network Design
- Mobility
- Security
- General Administration
- How to Transfer the WLC Crash File from the WLC CLI to the TFTP Server
- Upload Core Dump File to an FTP Server
- User Friendliness
As far as 2100 series controller are concern, we have Cisco 2100 Series Wireless LAN Controllers Best Practices.
For more information on the Design part, we can check more information on Enterprise Mobility Design guide which also talks about centralized and distributed design.
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