New 9800 WLC Pair - DNAC or Not?

[GRANT3779]

Hi CSC,

I'm looking to provision a pair of 9800-L-C in HA. These will be serving APs in a Non Fabric Deployment across multiple sites. The WLCs will sit in a central DC.
We have DNAC up and running and used for Assurance atm. I know I can get the WLCs discovered and managed by DNAC right at the start but wondering if there is any benefit in doing so? Rather than just continuing to configure/manage them via their own GUI/CLI which I believe allows you access to a lot more options/settings than DNAC provides you.

From my understanding, using DNAC takes away a bit of the complexity and does a lot of the workflows for you in the background when provisioning WLANs etc. I’m guessing one benefit.
If these were in DNAC and managed in there could they still be configured in the standard WEB GUI also if required? Assuming this would just sync up and reflect into DNAC?

Thanks

[balaji.bandi]

If the WLC not deployed in Fabric mode - not much config you can do using DNAC

but you can add the device to DNAC and Manage them assurance and Maps.

[GRANT3779]

I was going by this document belo which seems to suggest you could do pretty much everything from build HA, Deploy SSIDs, Provision APs. etc. Does this document not describe a non fabric deployment? Unless I'm missing something

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/solutions/CVD/Campus/Catalyst-9800-Non-Fabric-Deployment-using-Cisco-DNA-Center.pdf

[balaji.bandi]

pesonally non fabric WLC manage by DNAC wont advice (especially for the configuration)

[JPavonM · Accepted solution]

Yes you can manage greenfiled and brownfield deployments of C9800, but it's annoying the way DNA-C configure the WLC and if something fails in the future (And DNA-C failsa lot especially during code upgrades) it would be weird to understand the config that is there.

I only use DNA-C for assurance, maps and reports, but these are not such great than the corresponding ones on Prime.(I've never adapted to the way DNA-C works, and turning WLC into Fabric is not something that would happen in the short term in my company).