2 Wireless Controllers different vendors

[MahmoudYounis99107]

Good day !

Do we have a chance to install and activate 2 wireless controllers from different vendors in the same network? Ex: Existing WLC is Cisco and we need to expand with Huawei or Aruba or others.

[Karsten Iwen]

Yes, you can do it, but there are a couple of things to consider to make it smooth.

You must make sure that each AP finds the "right" controller. If the APs are configured for DHCP, it's best to have two separate IP-networks one with the DHCP-options for the old controller, one with the DHCP-options for the new controller. With that it will work fine.

[Arshad Safrulla]

This is completely possible, but you may loose lot of features

1. Seamless roaming between AP's belongs to different vendors will not work.

2. RRM (Radio resource planning) may not work correctly. As each WLC will run it's own RRM plan it is possible that AP's registered to Cisco will be flagged as Rogue by Aruba or Huawei and vice versa. Also this may result in increase interference 

[patoberli]

You can do this, but don't mix access points inside the same buildings. Only one vendor per building, or you will have very weird roaming issues that can cause short outages for the clients with dropped connections.

If you mix, also make sure to manually set the channel and signal strength, otherwise RRM will start to fight the other network. You might also want to disable Rogue AP with same SSID alerts, if you have them configured somewhere.