Smart Mesh in Unleashed?

[tero_leskinen]

As I read from the release notes, the Master AP and Standby master AP can't be Mesh AP's or Ethernet-linked Mesh AP's.

Taking that into account, how many AP's minimum is needed to take advantage of mesh at all? Eth-linked Master, Eth-linked Backup Master, Eth-linked Mesh, and Mesh? Four AP's to avoid only one cabled link? Is that correct?

[michael_brado]

You can mesh two Unleashed APs.  But only the wired one can/will be the Master AP.

It's recommended to have two or more wired APs, so you have failover capability in event the current Master becomes unavailable.

[jay_files]

No, that's not correct.

You could have only 1 Master (Root AP) and one Mesh AP. Only downside is, then you wouldn't have a Standby Master in that case, so no redundancy; if the Master goes down the whole network (only 2 APs in this case) would be down. 

You can also have - and I think this would be the recommended deployment - 1 Master, 1 Standby (both Root APs with wired Ethernet connection) and 1~23 Mesh APs. 

Hope that helps. 

[tero_leskinen]

OK, thanks!
That's what I thought, but the release notes got me confused 🙂 Have to test it.

[nat_nat]

Mesh and Smart Redundancy in Unleashed works as follows

1. For an AP to be a Master or Standby it MUST have Ethernet cable connected
2. Both Master and Standby AP or any Member AP can become a Root AP as long as they have Ethernet cable connected

If you have only two Unleashed APs in your network you can still create a Mesh network. In other words, AP with Ethernet connected will act as Master + Root AP. The AP without Ethernet cable will be a Mesh AP (piggy backing on to Master/Root AP). However, since Mesh AP has "no Ethernet" it can't be a Standby AP.