SD-ACCESS host mobility use cases.

[Evgeniy Ivanov]

I have a question about host mobility in SD-ACCESS. I understand that all switches in Campus have same SVIs so i don't need to change ip when i move from one switch or AP to another.

But my question is what is the practical using of IP Mobility? I mean i can't see cases where it becomes a huge problem to change IP.
Can somebody give an example, when IP Mobility is really neccessary?

Thanks!

[Scott Hodgdon]

Evgeniy,

In some environments like hospitals or manufacturing, devices have static IPs that would cost a lot of money to change if the device needed to be moved. For example, an imaging cart that is shared among floors or wings in a hospital. One of the first customers to look at SD-Access is a large pharmaceutical company that wants to build a flexible lab environment where scientists can build different configurations or share equipment among labs, and some of this equipment is statically IP'd.

The Anycast Gateway function also supports L3 mobility for SD-Access Wireless environments, so that the Wireless LAN Controller only has to do L2 roaming.

Cheers,

Scott Hodgdon

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

Enterprise Networking Group

[Evgeniy Ivanov]

Hi, Scott

Thank you for reply.

It is probably a very stupid questions, but i can't not to ask.
- imaging cart in a hospital. You mean terminal used by staff, like this one:
https://imagetechnologygroup.com.au/products/medical-cart

- What is the reason to have static IP on that terminal in hospital or on manufacturing? As per my understadning, all these terminals are using client-server software, and client ip address doesn't matter.
- How can changing of ip address cost a lot of money?

[Scott Hodgdon · Accepted solution]

Evgeniy,

Remember that equipment manufacturers are not often networking experts, so they build things in ways that we as networking people see as odd. I have seen modern devices with IP Address , Subnet Mask but no place to configure a default gateway. Forget DHCP in some of these cases. 

Also, a lot of hospital and manufacturing equipment can be quite old (I dealt with a hospital with 20 year old heart monitors), and the manufacturer charges a lot of money to send someone out to change an IP Address because they can :-) . I have seen multiple cases where the server for the device must be in the same subnet as the devices themselves. This results in stretched L2 VLANs through the whole campus in some cases ... not an ideal design. 

Cheers,

Scott Hodgdon

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

Enterprise Networking Group

[Evgeniy Ivanov]

Scott, thank you for help. I have spent a lot of time searching for this information, and found the answer only here.