08-31-2012 12:06 AM - edited 11-18-2020 02:59 AM
Untill 7.3 releases, all Wireless LAN controllers (WLC) ran on a dedicated hardware. For example we have 5500 Series, 2100 Series, 2000 series, WiSM on CAT6500 etc. The virtual wireless LAN controller (vWLC) is software that can run on hardware that is compliant with an industry standard virtualization infrastructure. Virtual wireless LAN controllers provide flexibility for users to select the hardware based on their requirement i.e. VMWare,ESx and ESXi 4.x & 5.x version. The Virtual Controllers are NOT expected to replace shipping hardware controllers.
1. Flexibility for the customer to select hardware based on their Requirement - So now the end user is not locked into single piece of hardware. We need to use VMware with specific requirements. Also make sure that we get the Hardware support checked from VMware site to run the Virtual controller without any issues. If the virtual controller is installed on a not supported platform, it may not work properly.
2. Reduces Cost, Space requirements and other overhead since multiple boxes can be replaced with a single hardware platform running multiple instances of controllers - This will save clients cost and they can run multiple controllers on this virtual machine. This can also save cost in data center.
3. Independent and mutually exclusive instances allows administrators to use multiple virtual controllers managing different campuses (or even managing multiple customer sites) using the same physical hardware -- The users can run multiple instances on single box. Another advantage is we can run redundancy between two vWLC on the same box.
Enable features provided by the virtualization software which includes High Availability (HA), ease of migration and fail over protection.
1. vSphere – vSphere is a virtualization infrastructure package from VMware., which includes ESX/ESXi hypervisor, vMotion, DRS, HA, Fault Tolerance and vSphere Distributed Switch. vSphere is like a stand alone client. This gives us the ability to create and connect to the virtual machine and make changes to the virtual machine.
2. vCenter Server – The VMware vCenter Server, formerly VMware VirtualCenter, provides a scalable and extensible platform that forms the foundation for virtualization management. vCenter server provides scalable way for the management of the platform. Another concept for vCenter is vMotion.
ESX / ESXi Hypervisor is a software component used in virtualization which allows multiple guest operating systems to run on a host computer all at the same time.
Hypervisors partition physical servers into multiple virtual machines. The hypervisor is going to control the physical disk access to the CPU which allows us to run virtualization. It also allows us to create multiple virtual machines on one machine but we cannot use hypervisor via console.
VMware ESX / ESXi hosts can't be managed directly from the console, and all the management of the base platform will be done via vSphere client or vCenter Server in order to access the console. This is required in case we need to adjust memory or disk size etc.
Virtual Machines are the fundamental building blocks in a virtualized infrastructure. What virtual machine essentially does is, it creates software container and each software container will represent how we are going to create CPU. Every software container contain its own virtual (i.e., software-based) CPU, RAM hard disk and network NIC.
A virtual machine is a tightly isolated software container that can run its own operating systems and applications as if it were a physical computer. Which means on top of this virtual machine, the controller software will be running, in the similar way it does on the physical machine.
In Virtual machine, the vWLC software talks to hypervisor instead of the CPU. Now the hypervisor will check which CPU or disk needs to engaged for the request sent from controller software. A virtual machine behaves exactly like a physical computer and contain its own virtual (i.e., software-based) CPU, RAM hard disk and network interface card (NIC).
so the hypervisor is the interface between the physical box and virtual controller software.
Controller Platform | Number of Rogue APs | Number of Rogue Clients |
Cisco Virtual Wireless LAN Controller | 800 | 1500 |
Controller Platform | Number of RFIDs Supported |
Cisco Virtual Wireless LAN Controller | 3000 |
The Virtual Controller will support a Console Port virtually which can be used to configure the device initially and manage the controller. Access to the virtual console port is obtained using these methods:
Accessible through vCenter / vSphere client using the vWLC VM’s console tab. Telnet to the port provided by the VMware (done during initial setup).
The Service Port is controlled by the Service-Port Interface and is reserved for out-of-band management of the controller, system recovery and maintenance in the event of a network failure.
Port 1 is used to connect to neighbor switch and will be used for communication with APs connected in the network. Unlike physical controllers, virtual controller supports only a single port. VM will maintain the mapping between physical ports and virtual ports. Any link aggregations are handled at physical ports using NIC teaming.
Cisco Wireless LAN Controller Configuration Guide, Release 7.3
Release Notes for Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers and Lightweight Access Points for Release 7.3.101.0
Virtual Wireless LAN Controller Deployment Guide
Cisco 5500 Series Wireless Controllers Release and General Information
Hi Omer, are you shure, have you tested 1242 with ctvm 7.5?
Thank you for the answer.
Regards
Alessandro Bertacco
Nice article, i have a question regarding vWLC deployment.
I want to configure Web-Auth using LDAP, the web login appears when client started to associate with AP, but when I tried to login it keep gave me error login. It said that my credential is wrong.
Thanks
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