Wavelink Mobile Manager Enterprise

Save time (and headaches) managing your WLAN infrastructure

When you've got a large enterprise wireless LAN infrastructure, keeping track of all your access points becomes a monster job as the network gets bigger. Wavelink's Mobile Manager Enterprise is a central administrative, management and infrastructure audit point for an 802.11 WLAN. In tests, we found that it's a major piece of the puzzle that can be made even larger with the integration of AirMagnet Enterprise (see related story) to help diagnose network problems.

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When you've got a large enterprise wireless LAN infrastructure, keeping track of all your access points becomes a monster job as the network gets bigger. Wavelink's Mobile Manager Enterprise is a central administrative, management and infrastructure audit point for an 802.11 WLAN. In tests, we found that it's a major piece of the puzzle that can be made even larger with the integration of AirMagnet Enterprise (see related story) to help diagnose network problems.

Mobile Manager Enterprise has an almost-surgical ability to manage a diverse set of access point brands and models in great detail by administrator-defined groups with pre-defined, articulate policies. Firmware upgrades and access control list (ACL) changes - the bane of access point management - can be rolled out with incredible ease. Wavelink keeps track of its list of compatible vendors and knows their foibles perhaps better than the access point vendors themselves. Where Wavelink can control, it has a very strong grip.

We found that the system can be fooled, but not for long. Mobile Manager Enterprise doesn't monitor the wires like a protocol analyzer or intrusion-detection application, so it's for wireless components only. It also has a limited set of enterprise wireless access points that are compatible with the system.

Monitor and manage

Mobile Manager Enterprise is a server-based application that runs on Windows 2000 server or XP Professional (with appropriate service packs installed). The server application joins a wired network where wireless access points reside. These networks can be local, or joined over a VPN or private network link.

The system monitors, controls and administers the discovered wireless access point infrastructure. Mobile Manager Enterprise runs as a Windows service, and an application called Administrator connects to the service through an authorized network adapter on the server.

The system probes the network via administrator-defined searches to look for access point signatures that it knows through an auto-discovery process (it looks for various Layer 2 signatures). Specific IP address ranges also can be monitored for access point signatures. When found, the access points are added to the Mobile Manager Enterprise database. Access points are categorized and become managed by groups and areas. The system manages only enterprise-class access points, and the compatibility list is important because incompatible access points must be managed singly and discretely. Managing an incompatible access point adds to the labor cost, thwarting the Wavelink system's usefulness. We wish more access point models could be managed with Wavelink, but because enterprise-class devices are uniformly managed through SNMP and ACLs, users of lower-priced access points with fewer features will be left out from Wavelink's management conveniences.

A graphical view of the network can be used to visualize discovered components. You then can watch mobile devices roam across the graphical maps imported into the application. We found this amusing but not incredibly compelling. This feature might be useful in tracking rogue devices as they roam through a large facility and potentially helps locate these devices when needed; otherwise, it's more of a gimmick.