* Cheat sheet for complex Cisco Wi-Fi portfolio
There is a dizzying array of Cisco products that span both lightweight (thin-AP) and autonomous (thick-AP) wireless LAN environments. What follows here and in the next newsletter is a kind of cheat sheet to help you keep it all straight.
In a nutshell, Cisco offers both centralized thin-AP/controller and autonomous/thick-AP WLAN environments. There is some unification of provisioning and policy-setting between each wireless environment, respectively, and Cisco wired network devices. However, provisioning and management of a mixed Cisco thin/thick wireless environment remains segregated in the Cisco portfolio. If you have a mixed Cisco wireless environment, then, you need either separate management systems from Cisco or a single heterogeneous management system from a third party such as AirWave.
Let’s examine the lightweight Cisco environment. The next newsletter will discuss the products that fall into the autonomous Cisco AP environment.
* Cisco lightweight APs.
Cisco Aironet 1000, 1130AG, 1200, 1240AG and 1230AG Series APs can operate in lightweight mode for centralized management. The 1000 and the lightweight versions of the others run the Lightweight Access Point Protocol (LWAPP), which enables the communication between Cisco APs and Cisco WLAN controllers.
* WLAN controllers and blades.
Some Cisco WLAN controllers, such as the Cisco 2000 and 4400 series, are stand-alone devices. The 2000, for smaller businesses, supports up to six APs. The 4400 supports up to 100 APs.
There is also the Cisco Catalyst 3750G Integrated Wireless LAN Controller, which combines a WLAN controller with a traditional wired Catalyst Ethernet switch. It supports 50 to 200 lightweight APs in one logical unit, which is a stack of up to nine 3750G devices.
Other Cisco lightweight WLAN controllers are in the form of switch/router blades. The Wireless Services Module (WiSM) for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 supports 300 thin APs per module and allows common provisioning and policy-setting across the thin-AP wireless environment and Cisco wired devices. There is also the Wireless LAN Controller Module, or WLCM, a blade for the Cisco branch-office Integrated Services Routers that supports up to six thin APs.
Any and all of these controllers can be managed, network-wide, by the company’s Wireless Control System (WCS), which gathers, aggregates and displays RF information from them on a common console. The WCS also manages the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance – which, in turn, collects location-centric information from APs and controllers for use in location-based applications.
