6/30/2017 Deploying a Wireless Network with Aruba in Ten Minutes - Envision Technology Advisors' blog

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Deploying a Wireless Network with Aruba in Ten Minutes

Anyone who is familiar with Aruba Networkswireless networking gearknows they

have a mix of controllers, switches and access points to provide a result of
ubiquitous wireless services within and across an Enterprise footprint.

However they also have controller-less access points that communicate with each
other in a virtual controller mode, called Aruba Instant mode. In Aruba Instant mode, a
single AP automatically distributes the network con guration to otherInstant APsin the
WLAN. After powering-up one AP, con guring it over the air, you can plug in the other
APs and have the entire network up and running.

A two node Aruba deployment with no dedicated controller took under ten minutes
from start to nish. I used theAruba AP-105access points and I will walk through the
process for you.

First, I plugged the initial access point in. I connected to the "INSTANT" SSID it was
broadcasting, and did the initial con guration. The initial con guration was basically
telling it what SSIDs I wanted to broadcast, and the characteristics of them. I created a
primary SSID (WILHELM) that is on my user network, a secondary SSID
(WILHELM_LAB) that was on my private network for my lab (VLAN 100), and a third
SSID (WILHELM_GUEST) that will be managed by the access point (it will hand out IPs,
NAT, provide the access controls, etc). The access points receive initial IPs via DHCP
and nd each other (you can statically assign each an IP easily) and you can also de ne
a virtual IP that the web portal can be accessed by (in this case 10.10.0.250).

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Con guring each SSID is very easy due to the interfacefor example, while con guring
the WILHELM_GUEST network as a AP-driven network you can de ne the splash /
landing page, and even de ne a per-user rate limit (I chose 2Mb/s):

Similarly, con guring the WILHELM_LAB SSID and tying it to VLAN 100 was as easy as
could be:

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In the two screenshots below (speci c sections of the UI expanded for explanation) you
will see the two access points on the LAN and the three wireless networks that I
con gured:

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Con guring all of this was very easy -- you type the SSID, the VLAN it should use on
the back-end, and any special requirements. The physical switch ports for the APs just
needed those VLANs on them of course. WILHELM and WILHELM_LAB pass tra c
back to the switch directly on their respective VLANs, and WILHELM_GUEST throws a
splash page and requires the user to access terms and conditions, and then gives them
an IP that is private (AP de ned) and doesn't let them access the main network.

I gave the cluster a single management IP and I can see tra c across the cluster, which
clients are where, overall (and speci c) throughput and a million other things. You can
also drill into a speci c access point with detailed metrics:

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I am a big fan of simpli ed user interfaces (where there is enough shown by default to
get started, but a huge amount of con guration parameters hiding behind a simple
Show Advanced Options link). The Aruba wireless access points are the right mix of
easy and powerful, and have very good performance ranging from home, small
business and enterprise use cases.

Read other blog articles from Envision

About the Author

Je Wilhelm
Chief Technology O cer

Je has 10-plus years experience developing large scale enterprise data management
platforms for a mix of consumer marketing services, data analytics, healthcare, corporate and
non-pro t customers. Je has deep experience with datacenter management, infrastructure
virtualization, and other e ciency and optimization initiatives and has also done systems and
application development and custom production leveraging computational clusters, data
provisioning across distributed networks and analysis against record-sets in the billions.

Connect with Je Wilhelm on Linkedin

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