APs in same VLAN as controllers?

[david_henderson]

We will using bridge mode for all of our APs per Ruckus best practice. All of our servers on campus run under VMWare and all of them whether running Windows, Linux, or some form of Unix reside in vlan 125. Normally we would place our Ruckus vSZ controllers in vlan 125. This is a vlan that at the moment we do not trunk outside the data center with our layer2/3 core switch providing routing to this vlan.

Two questions

1. Is there any reason to have the Ruckus APs also in vlan 125? It appears that a simple DNS entry can point the APs to the controller in a different vlan
2. We will be dividing wireless client traffic into different vlans based on type (district owned device, staff or student personal device, or guest device). Should the APs themselves be in a separate vlan from the vlans that carry wireless traffic? In other words, should the 400 APs that we plan on installing be in a vlan by themselves?

[david_henderson]

I just wanted to follow up with how we are setting things up. Our 400 R710s arrived a few days ago and we just stood up our first Smartzone Controller. The controller sits in vlan 125. Since we have a single campus, we have vlan 8 extended to every edge switch. This is the vlan that will carry AP management traffic. We choose to make trunk ports with vlan 8 and all the other vlans carrying client traffic and to make vlan 8 the native vlan on the port. This should allow the AP to get its IP address on vlan8 since we have a DHCP scope setup for this vlan.

We have the proper DNS record to point to the controller so once we configure the controller next week and plug in the first AP, it should find the controller and we can do some testing. We are hoping to have one building switched over to Ruckus before school starts and the rest to follow in the fall.

Thanks to everyone who responded to this post
Dave