Aerohive APs require Trunk Ports to function ?

[Alvin Chung]

Hi Everyone,

Does anyone has experience with Aerohive APs and Cisco Catalyst Switches ?

According to the Aerohive documentation, it's necessary to connect an Aerohive AP to a trunk port of a network switch, for example, Cisco Catalyst 3750X Switches, to allow the network traffics of multiple VLANs to pass through.

Is there any concerns to make all of the switch ports of a network switch to be the trunk port instead of an access port ?

Thanks !

Alvin

[Leo Laohoo]

If that is what Aerohive recommends, then I guess you should, at least, TRY it.

[Alvin Chung]

Hi Leo,

If an AP has connected to a trunk port of a Cisco switch and the DHCP server has been configured properly, is the AP able to get the IP address from the DHCP server ?

Are there any connectivity issues / performance impact if a switch port has been configured as a trunk port permanently ? I think it should not because the only difference between an access port and a trunk port is that a trunk port can carry multi-vlans traffics, in which the access port will need to be bound to a particular vlan, am I right ?

Regards,

Alvin

[Leo Laohoo]

If an AP has connected to a trunk port of a Cisco switch and the DHCP server has been configured properly, is the AP able to get the IP address from the DHCP server ?

Sure you can.  You  just configure the DHCP IP Helper address under the VLAN default gateway.

Are there any connectivity issues / performance impact if a switch port has been configured as a trunk port permanently ? I think it should not because the only difference between an access port and a trunk port is that a trunk port can carry multi-vlans traffics, in which the access port will need to be bound to a particular vlan, am I right ?

On the trunk port, you specify the VLANs you want to allow.

[Marvin Rhoads]

I set this up just as Aerohive suggests for a customer and it works fine. We had Catalyst 4500 switches with trunk ports for the Aerohive APs. We allowed 3 VLANs on the trunk - one each for management, guest and staff wireless.

IP helper on the core switch (layer 3 d/g) for the staff wireless VLAN. We actually ran the guest DHCP server on a firewall interface dedicated for the guest to increase their isolation from the staff network. That way no traffic ever flows from them to/from any non-guest VLAN.