Mobility Express vs EWC

[jmprats]

Mobility Express and AireOs are legacy and it seems that they will disappear with the EoL of Cisco 802.11ac AP
The option for small networks is to migrate to EWC.

Mobility Express and AireOs were great for those small networks and were very easy to manage

Now, I've been doing some testing with EWC and it's really complicated. You have to create tags, profiles and WLAN for a single SSID to work!

I don't know if it's just me or I have to get used to the new configuration model, but EWC doesn't seem like a product for a small network to me. Too much complexity.

Perhaps Meraki is a better product for those cases, but you can't migrate from Mobility Express to Meraki without changing all the APs.

Maybe someone with experience in such cases can shed some light.

Thank you

[Mark Elsen]

 - FYI : https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/ewc/17-11/matrix/MEandEWCFeatureComparisonMatrix.html , in the end EWC is more embedded 9800 and you need all those tags but it is not that complicated. As you also state modern access points will need EWC. You can also use WirelessAnalyzer to inspect an EWC configuration   with the CLI command : show  tech   wireless , have the output analyzed by  https://cway.cisco.com/tools/WirelessAnalyzer/  , please note do not use classical show tech-support (short version) , use the command denoted in green for Wireless Analyzer.               Checkout all advisories!

 M.

[jmprats]

Thanks for the info. Any recommended version for begin a new EWC installation with C9120AX?

[Mark Elsen]

 - Ref : https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/compatibility/matrix/compatibility-matrix.html , check it out for all compliance issues and info's

M.

[Rich R · Accepted solution]

I'd recommend 17.6.4 as a good starting point (as long as you don't need to support wave 1 APs) but always check the TAC recommended link in my signature below.
Yes 9800 is quite different and takes some getting used to - you just have to stop thinking in AireOS terms.  Having it all in IOS-XE is a huge plus factor for me.