Meraki L3 Roaming

[paul.2.smith]

Which is the best Meraki Layer 3 roaming solution to use, distributed L3 or via a concentrator? What are the relative merits of one over another (apart from not have to buy some MXs of course) and when would you use one over the other?

[Scott Fella]

Paul,

Can you explain more of your design? Sometimes you don’t need L3 roaming unless your access layer is layer 3 connected.

[paul.2.smith]

Thanks for the quick reply Scott.



It's a large building with multiple floors. To keep the broadcast domain smaller the access points on each floor will be separate layer 3 subnets whilst broadcasting the same SSID.



Want to make sure that roaming is available between floors and trying to understand the best method of doing this.

[patoberli]

Are we talking here about more than 500-1000 Accesspoints? If not, put them into one Layer 2. That isn't anymore a problem today, as long as you have at least 100 Mbit/s uplink speeds (I assume you have 1 Gbps, which makes the broadcast domain problem nearly obsolete).

[DaveS19691]

Not a problem?  That is quite a large blast zone should you experience a bridge loop.

[Scott Fella]

I agree with patoberli, you can successfully implement larger subnet. We have 1000+ users on a single subnet. It all depends on if each floor is separated by L3 or not. Either way, L2 is easier but L3 can also work.

[paul.2.smith]

I understand the argument of putting all APs in the same VLAN but I'm just trying to understand the benefits of Distributed L3 vs Concentrator roaming.

Is the main advantage of using a concentrator for roaming that it takes away the load of managing the roaming from the APs and passes it to the concentrator allowing the all of the APs resources to concentrate on connecting clients?

Is there a situation when you would use one method of L3 roaming over the other?

[kamalsoin]

i have a same senario , but my organization is bigger and we are talking about 500AP's. I have distribution 9500 connecting to cisco 9300 using L3 ospf.i have defined data,voice and wifi vlan 300.301and 302 on each and ever access switch getting IP thru DHCP. I have corporate SSID and executive SSID and they roam in all floors from 1st to 14th floor.

what would be best way to configure them so that they should not see any glitches and drops.

regards

[kamalsoin]

i have a same scenario , but my organization is bigger and we are talking about 500 AP's. I have distribution 9500 connecting to Cisco 9300 using L3 ospf.i have defined data,voice and wifi vlan 300,301 and 302 on each and ever access switch getting IP thru DHCP. I have corporate SSID and executive SSID and they roam in all floors from 1st to 14th floor.

what would be best way to configure them so that they should see any glitches and drops.

regards