Item: Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller
Rating: 7
Author: Jeffrey Thoenen

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a N + 1 deployment of Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller. We have over 8000 Cisco Access Points that are connected to the controller.

Pros and Cons

Comprehensive Radius integration
Scalable Deployments
Flexible Configuration

Code upgrades while in redundancy mode is cumbersome
Support of older access points is discontinued
Keeping configurations between primary and secondary controllers is difficult

Return on Investment

The Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller allows you to reduce your hardware footprint of wireless controllers deployed in your environment. Instead of having a controller per site deployed, you can have a couple of 8540 controllers in your data center that can handle up 6000 Access Points.
Some of the savings on hardware cost is offset by the cost of redundant WAN circuits. The access points will continue to function when connectivity to the Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller is unreachable, but it will not allow any new connections in that wireless environment.

Juniper Mist is similar to the Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller in functionality, but the Mist solution is cloud based, while the Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller is typically deployed in your data center environment.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller again?

Other Software Used

Plixer Scrutinizer, Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution, VMware SD-WAN, SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset, Ubiquity

Likelihood to Recommend

The Cisco 8540 Wireless Controllers is a great product for environments where you need repeated configurations across multiple sites. It allows the use of templates and groups to be scalable and repeatable to individual sites. Using separate ap groups, rf groups, and flexconnect groups allows you to modify a site at a time without affecting the entire enterprise.

It can be cumbersome to administrate the configuration without Cisco Prime, as there isn't any easy way to push individual configurations to an access point. Initially configuring an ap to join the controller and assigning it to the proper ap and flexconnect group can be time consuming.

Users and Roles

8 - They help support the wireless infrastructure. They will configure new deployments and help with ongoing wireless support issues.

Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller Enterprise Deployment

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco 8540 Wireless Controller