If anyone thinks the jury is out on 802.11n, check out last week’s AirWave panel on the pros and cons of 802.11n in higher ed for a different perspective.

It’s not a matter of “if”; now it’s a matter of how.

Click here to view the 802.11n in Higher Education Webcast

Our three panelists – Chris Murphy from MIT, Steve Lee from Virginia Tech, and Dan Eklund from Wayne State – were peppered with a non-stop stream of questions about implementation and deployment – concerning multiple radio frequencies, deployment, spacing, transition, capacity planning and more. Chris and Dan are deploying 802.11n now; Steve is holding off for the moment, which provided an interesting counterpoint to discussions.

And while the discussion was solely focused on the campus environment, I think anyone looking to deploy 802.11n in the near future will find this a useful discussion to listen in on, since most of the issues addressed are the same, whether your network serves a college, a company, a school or a government agency.

Feedback was very positive. Over 300 people attended. More are downloading it daily. Sample feedback: “I found this especially interesting and helpful since you featured multiple universities using different wireless vendors.”

Not for the first time, our panelists came across as three tough and experienced customers, who have high standards for their vendors and suppliers and a clear understanding of how to make technology fit the needs and goals of their employers. We’re grateful for their time and efforts.

And for their willingness to answer the tough ones. To me, toughness peaked towards the end of the event, when they were asked the big “What If” question overlying all discussions of 802.11n today: What if the final 802.11n standard differs so much from the current interim standard that you find you have to change hardware?

You could hear a pin drop at that moment. Or at least, I could. Their answers were great, but I don’t have space to report it, so you’re going to have to listen to the recording to hear them.

Recently, while getting some bids for a home construction project, one of them came back with a dollar figure coupled with this caveat: ‘Bigger than a bread box, smaller than a submarine.’ I see this same kind of concept practiced with wireless capacity planning at a lot of the companies that see on a day to day basis.

Why do so many IT departments follow this planning philosophy?

Well, it boils down to not having the reporting and visibility required to make good business decisions to maximize the IT budget.

Over the last year, I have done several webcasts around capacity planning and wireless best practices. Most of these have focused around the wireless side of the equation, but as wireless becomes more ubiquitous, there is now the requirement to look at other pieces of the puzzle as well. Take for example the wireless hotspot marketplace. Many of these locations are served with DSL or cable modem access. Remote office locations are also typically served by these types of links as well. In this case, what component is the weak link in the chain? Of course, the WAN link is the limiting factor!

In the latest version of the AirWave Management Platform, there is now the ability to monitor and report on switches, routers, and other gear in the network that can impact the wireless network. In addition, there is a new Capacity Planning report that not only shows the capacity of the wireless APs and controllers, but can also show capacity available on other network components as well.

In case you missed it, industry expert Craig Mathias was featured on Network World’s podcast series to discuss his selection for the WLAN industry’s “Category-Breaker,” defined as “products that go above and beyond to solve IT issues.”

We here at AirWave were absolutely smitten when we found out that the AirWave Wireless Management Suite Version 5.3 was chosen; in addition, Craig did an excellent job providing those unfamiliar with our solution an excellent synopsis of the features and benefits of our solution. If you’ve not yet heard it, click here to listen to Network World’s Category Buster: AWMS 5.3.

Summary from the Network World site:

As part of the Best Products 2008 coverage, we present a special podcast with Network World blogger and IT Roadmap presenter Craig Mathias, who talks about the distinguishing features and functionality of the latest Air[W]ave Wireless Management suite (12:01).

I encourage all of you to give it a listen and/or pass it on to anyone who you feel could benefit from understanding the features and functionalities of AWMS.

It’s great to finally see the industry recognizing WLAN management as a criticial component of an organization’s infrastructure.

For more Craig Mathias, click here.

 

 AirWaves Podcast with Manatee Schools [20:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this latest installment of AirWaves, I spoke with Ron Jones who is one of the Network Systems Managers for Manatee County School District, one of the largest in the country with over 49,000 students and 7,000 employees.

Like most school districts, the wireless network at Manatee has grown over time. Manatee CSD now has about 2,000 wireless access points from Cisco and ProCurve by HP and serves up wireless access to just about every campus in the district.

As you can imagine, Ron has his hands full and has found ways to use his AirWave Management Platform to streamline many of the manual processes.

With many IT departments embracing virtualization, AirWave fields an increasing number of questions from clients wanting to know if they can run the AirWave Management Platform (AMP) as a virtual machine on VMware or on another virtual platform. The simple answer to the question is a resounding, “Yes! — AMP runs just fine as a virtual machine.” As AirWave’s resident expect on server virtualization, I thought I’d take a few moments on a lazy Sunday to share with the AMP community what I call my Seven Simple Rules for running AMP as a virtual machine. Here they are:

Rule #1 - Choose Your Virtual Platform Carefully.

A few years ago virtualization choices were limited, with VMware dominating the scene. Today, the number of virtual software platforms has exploded, with VMware still leading the pack of closed-source and open-source virtual machines. But AMP is both a memory-intensive application as well as a CPU-hungry program — this tends to place hard bounds on which virtual platforms are well-suited to running AMP as a virtual machine.

If you were thinking of running AMP on any of the free offerings from VMware, think again; while AMP will run on these platforms, it won’t run well. In the lab, we’ve tested AMP on a VMware Server, and ran into several post-install problems, including scaling limitations, memory constraints and an annoying clock-drift problem when running as a guest OS on Windows operating systems. For best results, you definitely need a VM that will allow you to virtualize AMP with a minimum of 2 GB of RAM and preferably at least two virtual CPUs. VMware’s ESX offers these options, as do a few other virtual machine platforms.

Rule #2 - Remember the Hardware Requirements

One of the oft-touted advantages of virtualization is that virtualization gets you off the hardware hook; with a virtualized application, hardware isn’t supposed to make a difference, and both operating systems and applications can gain true independence from hardware. However, what’s true for device drivers and system architectures isn’t always true for scalability. As noted above, AMP will not run well on your average $200 PC-of-the-Week special. If you want to run AMP as a virtual machine, you need to keep the hardware requirements firmly in mind.

Virtualization enacts slight a tax for hardware independence — typically, 256 MB of RAM, 10% of the CPU and a few gigabytes on the hard disk. That may not sound like much, but it means that you’ll need a beefy box to run AMP in a virtualized environment. We recommend you virtualize AMP on dedicated hardware, and that you leave some room for expansion. Think about systems with at least 4 GB of RAM and preferably a quad-core processor. AMP’s published hardware requirements are your best bet for properly scaling the system you’ll use to virtualize AMP.

Rule #3 - You’re Entering the Red Hat Zone

The AMP install ISO is based on a derivative of Red Hat known as CentOS. The advantage of CentOS is that it’s free to redistribute and it costs nothing to upgrade as bug fixes and new Linux packages become available. The current version of the AMP ISO (as of AMP 5.2.3) runs CentOS 4.3, which maps directly to Red Hat 4.3. The next scheduled release, AMP 5.3, will run CentOS 5.0, which maps to Red Hat 5.

Whenever you’re presented with OS options by the virtual machine, usually during install, choose the option for Red Hat 4, or Red Hat 5 if you’re using an AMP ISO based on the CentOS 5 system. The same applies to installing VMware Tools (more on this later).

Rule #4 - Use Expanding Disks

Most VM implementations allow you to choose to use an expanding disk, or allocate the entire disk space during install. Unless you have a SAN-based virtual infrastructure, or have a complex disk partitioning scheme in mind, expanding disks offer far more flexibility at very little cost in performance.

The first beauty of expanding virtual disks is that they start out small, making it much easier to port them from machine to machine via LAN, WAN or even old-style SneakerNet with an external drive. The second beauty of expanding disks is that they allow you to create large partitions for future growth without having to immediately allocate the byte space on a real disk. The performance penalty, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be much at all. However, not setting up a large enough partition for AMP at the beginning can be a real show-stopper — there are ways to bump-up partition sizes post-install, but none of them are what I’d call easy. Save yourself the hassle and start with a partition size large enough to accommodate both current and future needs, and let the VM expand the disk file as needed.

Rule #5 — Beware the Virtual Console

All virtual machine implementations offer an interface to the console of the guest OS, essentially a window displaying what you would see on the screen if you could actually attach a screen to a running virtual OS. In the case of AMP, virtual console displays are unnecessary, and can slow down your work with a virtualized version of AMP.

Most virtual console displays assume that you’re running a guest OS offering a graphical interface at the system console, which is not the case with AMP. Technically speaking, AMP’s console runs in a Linux/UNIX mode known as INIT 3, which is a purely text-based console mode. VMware’s remote console application, to use as an example, creates a screen scrape of the guest OS virtual console and then throws those bits across the network for reassembly on your console viewer application. This works great for a GUI-based console, but it’s inefficient and needlessly slow for a text-based console. Consider, instead, using SSH for access to the AMP command line. It’s faster, it uses far fewer network resources and in the limited number of cases where you need to access AMP at the command line instead of via the web-based GUI, SSH is a much better method of doing so. PuTTY is a great Windows SSH application, and you’ll find it faster and easier to use than a virtual console.

Rule #6 - Installing VMware Tools in a Text-based Environment

I always recommend installing VMware Tools (or other like-minded virtual machine post-install packages) on virtualized AMPs. Unfortunately, VMware’s instructions for doing so in a non-GUI environment are incomplete as they assume a desktop, etc. Have no worries though; it is possible to install VMware Tools on a virtual AMP. It’s also surprisingly easy, if you know the method.

First, while AMP is running use the VMware console to start the VMware Tools install. Next mount the VMware tools ISO at the AMP’s command line:

mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Again from the command line, extract the VMware Tools TAR file to AMP’s /tmp directory:

cd /tmp/; tar -xvzf /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-7.6.2-62573.tar.gz

(Note that the exact name of the VMware Tools TAR file will very likely be different from the one in the example above; use the full filename of the gz file you’ll find in /media/cdrom)

Finally, run the VMware Tools install script and choose all of the default options during install:

/tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl

Rule #7 - Learn to Love Disk Image Files

One of the things I like best about virtualization is how easy it is to quickly install an operating system using just a disk image (ISO). I always surprise my colleagues at AirWave with how quickly I can install a test AMP using nothing more than a disk image and a free virtual machine.

Depending on how much disk space you have available, consider keeping around an AMP ISO and a copy of your virtual machine disk. There are some interesting tricks you can do with a virtual AMP that are difficult or impossible to pull-off with your typical system-based installs. Considering an upgrade to a new version of AMP? Test it on the AMP virtual disk copy first by building a new virtual machine around it, without ever having to shutdown your production AMP. Or, as an alternative, build a fresh AMP install with the ISO, then load an AMP backup to check the upgrade. Want to know if a memory upgrade will improve AMP’s performance? This is easy to test with a virtual machine. With AMP and a virtual disk image file, the sky’s the limit to what you can do.

 

 AirWave Podcast with CSU San Marcos [15:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As some of you may have heard, the California State University System announced back in September that all 23 schools will eventually be moving off of Cisco WLAN gear and onto Aruba Networks products. AirWave is currently being used to manage and monitor wireless networks at 7 of the CSU campuses including CSU San Marcos.

In this episode of AirWaves I spoke with John Humes who is the Network Manager at CSU San Marcos and was on the evaluation committee that selected Aruba as the standard for the CSU system moving forward.

Like many of the CSU schools, San Marco is currently using Cisco for their WLAN infrastructure and John discusses the issues he faces on a daily basis and how a tool like AirWave makes his life easier.

John also describes the migration path and how AirWave’s multi-vendor capabilities will play a strategic role in their network moving forward.

I was going through some of my webinar questions the other day, and someone was asking if I was still a Ham Radio operator. Well, the answer is yes and my call sign is KB5EWE (extra class).

Another question that was asked revolved around the fact that the 802.11 spectrum is shared RF space and could that cause problems once everyone is using the limited amount of spectrum. Well, this is certainly an issue, but with the low power output and some of the advanced algorithms that the latest generation of AP use, it’s much less of a problem than one might think. That is, until you take the case of someone like a Ham Radio operator who can use much more transmit power and much higher antenna gain on channels 1-6 than someone who is not licensed by the FCC (Part 15 vs. Part 97).

One of the reasons that Ham Radio operators like the VHF and UHF bands (where 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz reside) is the fact that these signals can pass through the ionosphere right into outer space. Some operators will ‘bounce’ signals off the moon to get around the line of sight issues and talk to someone on the other side of the globe. I’ve even used my 144Mhz (2 meter band) radio to talk to an astronaut on the space shuttle as it circled the earth. For more information on Ham Radio, a good resource is the American Radio Relay League (www.arrl.org).

Last week I spent some time doing half-day AirWave training road shows. Most of the folks in my classes were from small to medium size companies and the types of questions that I received really hit home that there is still a lot of wireless training that needs to be done to bring everyone up to speed.

For example:

• Why in the U.S. do we typically only use channels 1,6, and 11?
• Should all of my APs at a single site have the same SSID’s?
• What does RSSI and dbm mean when talking about wireless signals?

These are basic questions that all wireless administrators should understand.

There are several courses out in the market place today that try to address the basics of wireless networking. I would recommend some of the CWNP classes (www.cwnp.com). These courses are great for people who already understand some of the basic network concepts, but want to elevate their wireless knowledge level and increase their marketability to employers.

This morning, we announced that AirWave has agreed to merge with Aruba Networks. We expect this to be great news for our customers. Our mission remains absolutely unchanged: to develop the premier multi-vendor management software that allows our customers to operate and support their wireless networks.

Aruba is fully committed to operating AirWave as a business unit focused on developing and providing multi-vendor management software. The AirWave software will simply get better, because we’re going to have the resources of a larger organization behind us – and we expect this will enable us to add support for even more hardware vendors. Supporting the leading hardware vendors that our customers choose is critical to everything we do.

We believe in open, standards-based technology – and in giving every customer the freedom to choose the products that best meet their specific requirements. Aruba believes exactly the same thing… and that’s why this combination makes so much sense to us.

I’ve spoken with and emailed a number of AirWave customers this morning and have been very touched that many so people’s first questions have been, “What does this mean for AirWave employees? Is everyone going to be OK?”. First… I want to thank everyone for their concern for the people they’ve built relationships with over the past several years. I also want to reassure everyone that this transaction is a very good thing for the people of AirWave – AirWave’s employees are being kept together as a team and will operate as business unit. This will provide us the additional resources we need to develop even more interesting applications in the future.

From a customer perspective, nothing changes. You should call the same support number, talk to the same people, log into the same user forum… We’re here to help, and if you have any questions, just give us a call.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Managing anything in a K-12 environment can be a very strenuous activity. Imagine all those different school buildings, thousands of students, parents, and teachers and then multiply that by government regulation and bureaucracy. In this episode of AirWaves we speak with Michael Cooper of Oak Hills Local School District who has been managing a Cisco autonomous AP based network for several years. Michael shares his thoughts on WLAN network management and how he transitioned from an, “I’ll just console in,” management style to valuing the benefits of an enterprise grade network management tool. Please take a listen and provide your feedback in our forums.