The feature gaps you mention suggest that despite all the years that this solution has had to bake, it does not have feature parity with its competitors. It appears to be more than just a difference in architecture.
I find it interesting that 2+ years after the introduction of 802.11n APs and ensuing debate regarding of centralized versus distributed, that the debate has simmered down and the throughput of the controllers has met everyone's needs or the vendor has a reasonable method for scalability. Has anyone seen a dual-radio 802.11n AP with a sustained throughput of even 20 Mbps over a 5-minute polling period? >From what I read on this list, client/AP interoperability and AP/controller software stability are the top two technical issues that wireless administrators face. Frank -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:wireless-...@listserv.educause.edu] On Behalf Of Jason Mueller Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 11:25 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] 802.11n Solutions Pablo, Our experience with the HP MSM765 controller is mixed. It has a conceptually different architecture than most of the other controller models out there. One key difference is that the controller works much better in an environment where you forward traffic from wireless users directly at the AP rather than tunneling user traffic back to the controller (distributed rather than centralized model). There are both pros and cons to this approach. The HP support engineers have encouraged us to use the distributed approach with this product for our primary SSID (WPA2-enterprise/AES). There is no *simple* association of an SSID to a VLAN, if you tunnel traffic to the controller. You can assign VLANs to an SSID at the controller, but there are two ways to do it and caveats that go along with both. There are a couple of roadmap features that might be very powerful in terms of fixing this issue, but nothing that has been realized in current production code. An SSID <-> VLAN relationship is easy to construct, if you bridge traffic at the AP rather than the controller. In fact, if you are using a distributed model, you can set the VLAN <-> SSID relationship for all APs, a group of APs, or individually at a single AP (and you can have a mix based on simple inheritance rules). In our testing case, we have a different VLAN for our primary SSID per building. We have had several issues with their web-based captive portal, but I don't think there is a perfect captive portal in any controller-based solution. You should note that you must forward traffic to the controller, if you want to use the captive portal. We have also had some performance issues when tunneling traffic to the controller. We would really like to see user load balancing across both APs and bands rolled into the product (no band steering and no active user balancing across APs). You can set the maximum number of users you want per radio, but that value is set across an entire SSID on a controller rather than being applied per a group of APs (i.e., there is no way to vary this setting by geographic region or AP type other than adding an additional controller). The RF management is fairly rudimentary, but I am sure this is being worked on diligently. There is currently no N+1 redundancy, but you might well imagine that this is also an issue they are diligently working on. You can get some redundancy now by simply assigning multiple controller addresses to the APs. The MSM422 itself has done well in our pilot and testing (~100 APs). We have been supporting about 800 simultaneous users in our library during the busiest two weeks of the year. We have had a reasonable response on the engineering and support side. I think this is a great fit for small to medium sized deployments. But you will need to consider whether the product scales appropriately for your environment. I encourage you to contact an HP sales representative that might be able to give you more detailed information about the product roadmap and future features. If you want to know some more specifics about our experience, contact me off-list. -Jason ****************************** Jason Mueller Network Design Engineer Indiana University, UITS 812-856-5720 jasmu...@indiana.edu ****************************** On Dec 16, 2009, at 6:55 AM, Pablo J. Rebollo-Sosa wrote: > Hi, > > We are looking for 802.11n solutions. I would like know more about > Enterasys and HP solutions experience. > > Best regards, > > Pablo J. Rebollo > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE > Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/ > . ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
