I
obtained my CCNA v3 recently and I must say it’s exciting to be officially
certified! I say officially because I, like many people, have actually been
configuring CISCO routers and switches in SMEs for some years now. In
particular, I love wireless, and I have been setting CISCO wireless Access
Points for some time, but mostly low end Linksys APs - not that impressive, huh?
I work for a small to medium-size
NGO that deals in health. And one thing that is rife in such organizations is the
fact that they tend to hire one IT personnel to do all IT work – technical and
user/help desk support. The common title is IT officer which basically means
you do everything IT, and that includes setting wall clocks – see what I’m
saying?
I know I’m describing someone’s
pain out there but enough of that for now. The reason I’m writing this is to
state my love for CISCO Mobility Express, a feature that saved my day today.
We recently acquired the Aironet
3800 series, a very impressive AP indeed! I remember during the procurement
planning, all we told our vendor for specifications was that it has to be the
latest AP from CISCO, and Aironet 3800 series it was! What we didn’t know was the
fact that this model ships with the default CAPWAP image in which when powered
on, it looks for an existing Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) – an infrastructure
we don’t have in place! I did some digging and it seemed like we had the following
options to set it up: buy hardware WLC or use virtual WLC (vWLC) which requires
licences for each Lightweight Access Point. The latter’s requirements were IBM
or CISCO servers and VMWare - https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/wireless/virtual-wireless-controller/113677-virtual-wlan-dg-00.html#hardware
. Some resources also suggested that Hyper-V and HP servers could be supported.
We didn’t have most of these
things but we had to make the AP work because we couldn’t return the device to
the vendor since it was specs oversight on our side. I then stumbled across the
CISCO Mobility Express (ME) feature which I think will make wireless implementers
in SMEs love CISCO wireless. Mobility Express, available on selected CISCO Aps -
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/access_point/mob_exp/83/user_guide/b_ME_User_Guide_83/about_mob_exp.html,
allows you to configure an AP as a WLC which then serves as an AP itself and a
controller for new APs. When new supported APs are installed on a switch port (switch
trunk port if AP will have VLANs), this AP will automatically detect settings
from the WLC AP. Thus still giving you or imitating an enterprise-class centralized
WLC.
I had some more work do on our
3800 though: changed image from CAPWAPP to ME plus some configurations. Note
that you must have a service contract for the device to download the image. I
didn’t so I opened a chat with CISCO support and they sent me the links to the
images since the device is still on warranty.
I hope this information is
helpful to someone!
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