Autonomous vs standard WLAN

[alexandre_allai]

Hi,

I still hesitate regarding the interest of creating Autonomous vs Standard WLAN I have dig for answers in old post or User guide, but didn't really find it.
I only have ZDs 9.12 / 9.13 with Open/WPA2 wlans and "Auto Recovery" is disabled.

Standard :
In case of ZD failure, will the APs stay alive and still serve connected + new clients  ? Even if ZD failure is more than 24h ?

Autonomous :
When ZD is up, are the roaming mechanism still well performing on this autonomous wlan ?

Thanks for your help.

Alexandre.

[monnat_systems]

Hi Alex

Standard :
In case of ZD failure, will the APs stay alive and still serve connected + new clients  ? Even if ZD failure is more than 24h ?

I am assuming that standard WLAN is in question here so currently connected Users will remain connected with AP until AP reboots as per recovery mode time set. No "new" user will be able to connect to standard WLAN as there is a dependency for controller to process the auth data and give a go to AP to allow new users to join it.

autonomous WLAN comes in to picture let say that ZD fails and won't be there for couple of week so there has to be some way so that network is up with some limitations hence when Autonomous WLAN is configured in advance and controller fails, autonomous WLAN would be there to connect for all users both currently connected and new users but there will be no dependency on controller to process their auth data. Everything is handled at AP level so u will have functional network with certain limitations...
Roaming will not work as AP(s) is standalone..

hope this helps...

[alexandre_allai]

Hi,

It helps ... I didn't expect that new user were not able to connect on standard wlan when ZD is off,
just confirmed in LAB. +1pt point for autonomous.

Last question is performance on autonomous wlan when ZD is up (most of the time).
Any difference with standard mode ? Roaming still optimize by controller ?
Any feedback from real life ?

Thanks again.

Alexandre.

[monnat_systems]

Last question is performance on autonomous wlan when ZD is up (most of the time).
when user connects to autonomous WLAN, no role is being played by ZD. everything is processed by AP ...when ZD comes back online, AP will re-join and everything would be back to normal...

Any difference with standard mode ? Roaming still optimize by controller ?
yes, attempt is made to make roaming better by controller however it is largely dependent on end device driver capabilities to roam correctly..

Any feedback from real life  -- no, i have not tried it.

[andrea_mijares]

Hello Alexander,

I agree with the comments, but I have to say that the roaming in Ruckus works really fine even without the controller, of course that you have to made a good deployment for this.

The only thing that I don't like about the "autonomous WLAN" is that in case that you have a WLAN authenticated using 802.1X, it doesn't support this type of authentication so you need the controller for this case.


Regards,