In the first post in this series, I talked about recommendations for switches and routers to purchase for your home lab. Now let’s talk about wireless LAN controllers (WLCs). In terms of how many controllers you should buy, you’ll want at least two of them. There are enough features that require a pair of controllers to warrant having more than one. At least one of these should be a 4400 or 5500 in order to support guest tunneling and a few other features. If you want to replicate our racks, you’ll end up needing four WLCs.
In the actual lab, you will use 5508 series WLCs. The cheapest 5508s I was able to find on ebay cost $4000. 2504s run over $700 each. That’s a hard pill to swallow for most budgets. So let’s go back a generation to the 4400s and 2100s.
2100 WLCs
2106 WLCs are the lowest cost controllers that you’ll want to use for your studies. You can generally find them for around $300 on ebay. From a feature standpoint, they are similar to a 2504 controller. They can do most things with some of the following notable exceptions when compared to a 4400.
- They cannot be the target of an auto-anchor tunnel.
- They do not support LAG.
- They support only 16 WLANs.
- They do not have a service port.
- They do not support QoS bandwidth contracts.
- They do not support Multicast-Unicast mode.
- They do not support wired guest access.
Even with these restrictions, they can do a lot in terms of the wireless blueprint. They have the benefit of having native Ethernet ports that can plug right into a 3550 or 2950 10/100 port. They even have a few PoE ports that you could plug lightweight APs into. That allows you to create a little mini-lab of a WLC and 1-2 APs that you can travel with you fairly easily.
If you were looking to replicate our racks, you could use 2106 WLCs in place of the two 2504s (WLC3 and WLC4).
4400 WLCs
4400 series WLCs are similar in functionality to the 5508s that you’ll see in the lab. They support just about every feature that you would see in the lab. But they do come at a higher cost of around $375 – $475 for the 12 AP models. Those will come with a pair of 1 Gb SFP ports that will need something installed in them. Copper SFPs will run around $25 each. So add $50 to the cost of the controller if those are not included. You also have to plug the WLC ports into 1Gb ports on a switch. They will not work at 100Mb. So either plug them into the 1 GB native Ethernet ports on a 2950T or into one of the Gig ports on a 3550 with copper GBICs installed.
You should have at least one of these WLCs in your home lab since the 2100s are missing a number of significant features. If you would like to replicate our racks, you should have two of these to take the place of the 5508s (WLC1 and WLC2).
Other options
The budget conscious student may ask about using the virtual WLC (vWLC) available today. Free is always an enticing price. But you will run into some difficulties trying to use this for CCIE studies.
First, they do not run the code in the lab. The lab uses 7.0.116.0 and the earliest version of code available for the vWLC is 7.3.101.0. So you would have to keep the feature differences between the codes versions in mind. And there are quite a few differences to keep track of.
Next, because they run newer code, you’ll have a hard time using them in WCS. The WCS has no knowledge of what a vWLC is. I haven’t tried, but I doubt you’d be able to even add a vWLC to WCS.
The last hurdle to the vWLC is that it only supports APs in H-REAP/FlexConnect mode. So even if you go through the needed hurdles to get an AP to even join the vWLC, you cannot do local mode or even mesh mode.
So even though the price is right, it’s not a very good solution for CCIE studies.