Wireless Controller vs Mobility Express

[bomishketi4]

Hi All,

I'm testing out Cisco's Mobility Express on a 3802i and am running into "gotcha" moments that I wasn't expecting. I'm hoping some of you more experienced people on here can help guide me through and find solutions if they exist.

Goal: I'm considering replacing my WLC5508 with a 3802i running ME.

To start... getting MGMT up and running on a trunk port was fun (has to be native vlan). Not to mention you need DHCP enabled on mgmt so the underlying AP can actually join and the system to not just sit still.

I now have the 3802i up and running and have a couple AP's joined to it (few hours spent before I realized I have to configure a TFTP server on ME that has the software the slave AP's require).

I created vlan 2074 and trunked it to the ME AP, created a WLAN on that VLAN and everything worked.

Disabled the radios on the ME AP to see if I could connect through the Slave AP. But it looks like the slave doesn't send the traffic back through the CAPWAP tunnel to the Master as it does in the WLC. Is that something that's configurable or am I stuck trunking the vlan's to every AP I have configured (administration overhead).

That's as far as I've gotten so far, if anyone else has tips or tricks that might help me along the way, please let me know.

Thanks

[Sandeep Choudhary]

Hi,

In a Mobility Express deployment, all clients are centrally authenticated and data traffic is locally switched by the access point including primary AP which also service clients.

The switch ports to which Access Points will connect can be an access port or a trunk port. It is recommended to use a trunk port because it enables management traffic and client data traffic to be segmented across separate VLANs. If you do not wish to segment management and client data traffic, configure the switch ports as access ports.

My recomamndation is to connect all APs in Trunk mode.

Regards

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[Rich R]

From https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/enterprise-networks/mobility-express/q-and-a-c67-734485.pdf
What features are supported on Cisco Mobility Express when compared to appliance-based wireless LAN controllers?
Mobility Express is based on the Flex architecture and supports central authentication and *local switching* of data traffic. For a list and comparison of features, please refer to the feature matrix at: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/technotes/8-7/b_feature_matrix_for_802_11ac_wave2_access_points.html

> Is that something that's configurable or am I stuck trunking the vlan's to every AP I have configured (administration overhead).
It is not configurable, only local switching is supported, so you'll have to configure the vlans.

Also AireOS/ME have limited life left in them so you may want to look at eWLC on Catalyst AP instead (although that does have new license requirement)