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CiscoWorks Wireless LAN Solution Engine 2.5, free software upgrade to run on CiscoWorks 1130 WLSE 2.0, which costs $8,495. Cisco Systems, (800) 553-NETS. www.cisco.com |
Easy Setup, Quick Payoff
I deployed the WLSE 2.5 on Syracuse University's Air Orange wireless network, and through the WLSE's browser interface, SNMP discovered our wireless access points and bridges. Cisco claims the WLSE 2.5 will manage 2,500 APs, so my 70 or so were not a challenge to the discovery and inventory process.
I built policy profiles for access points and bridges and assigned to them my mix of Aironet 350s and 1200s. At the first polling cycle, I found that a few of my devices violated various aspects of the set policies. Telnet was enabled when it shouldn't have been, and in more than one instance, broadcast in SSID was wrongly enabled. A click on the device opened the WLSE's minibrowser for fixes to the configurations, and each problem was quickly solved.
To truly leverage the new capabilities of the Radio Manager module, I needed to set up the underlying WDS (Wireless Domain Services) topology of my APs, as this is an integral part of Cisco's SWAN architecture. The access points report radio data to the WDS, which pass it on to the WLSE for analysis. Setting the WDS was time-consuming and meant upgrading the access points to the minimum firmware version required to support the capability of sampling the air and reporting.
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