Chris, We use vlan pools in our Aruba wireless configurations to accommodate our students. Normally, the same ip address will follow a student around as they roam so that makes roaming easier. We have had problems with large events because we simply don’t have enough AP’s in some of the large environments that we would need. This means that in a large event, we over saturate our AP(s). We may address that in the future, but in the meantime, it is critical for our support staff to have wireless access at these events. So we created an Event ssid and provisioned it for an AP that we bring to the event and plug in before the event. Only our support team is allowed to authenticate to this particular AP. I know this doesn’t make all of the end users happy, but it makes our support team happy. Technically speaking, many devices that connect are automatic and not intentional. So the majority of people with a cell phone are probably automatically connecting even though they have no need. But they still saturate.
The bigger problem for us is to deploy more AP’s in those environments someday. Tim *From:* The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto: [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Chris Adams (IT) *Sent:* Monday, December 19, 2016 1:50 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [WIRELESS-LAN] Large Wireless Deployment Addressing All, I wanted to poll the group and see what strategies you are using at your Universities for client addressing on large wireless networks. We are revisiting how we address and segment our wireless LAN largely due to the need to accommodate large events and sports arenas. We have operated with buildings in various wireless “zones” with a VLAN/subnet per zone. Going forward some of our larger event spaces will need to support 3000+ clients in the same building. What has the approach been for handling address allocations at your institutions? Most research I’ve found suggests either using VLAN pooling or very large subnets with client isolation. These won’t easily work for us, at least in academic areas, as we have many faculty using airplay, doceri, and other client to client applications. Going with large subnets per building may cause a lot of broadcast traffic volume issues and potential roaming issues between buildings (sticky clients?). If it helps, we are an Aerohive shop and using Windows Server 2012 DHCP in HA configuration. Thanks, Chris Adams, CISSP Director, Network & Telecom Services Division of Information Technology University of North Georgia E-Mail: [email protected] | Office: (706) 867-2891 ********** 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/.
