Cisco Mobility Express: Simple IT, Max Performance - A Solutions Lab webcast

[Music] [Music] hello and thank you for joining us today I'm Jeff with dnh distributing and joining me from Cisco today is Raja thank you Jeff for having me thank you for coming and he's here to talk to us a little bit about mobility Express today mobility Express is a really cool technology that allows you to install controller-based wireless solutions without having to purchase the controller so Raja tell us a little bit about what mobility Express is and how it kind of fits in with Cisco sure so when you think about small to medium customers I mean what they need is they need something that is simple to setup simple to manage they need something that is reliable it has some built in redundancy and most importantly they need something that is cost-effective and it's affordable so what Cisco has done is this question design this mobility Express solution and what it is is it is actually a virtual controller that runs on 11ac wave two access points it is really simple set up it has a very simple UI interface to manage it and in terms of the features it supports both advanced enterprise great Dublin and other features and as I said again you know the solution has to be affordable most importantly mobility Express is a very affordable solution from Cisco absolutely and those are all important things that we hear all about in the small business world all the time so you said that there's a lot of different access points out there what what can run this what access points are going to work with mobility Express right so if you look at the Cisco 11ac wave - access point portfolios starting from the 1800 - is access points going all the way up to 28 38 and 40 800 - these access points all of these access points can run mobility Express and what I have on the table here is I have three flavors of those access points I have the 18 15 w access point which is a great access point for hospitality and dorm rooms this can run mobility Express we have the 18 15 I access point which is great for retail and we also have our enterprise level 2800 Series access points which is great for high-density deployments so you really have quite the gambit here everything from hospitality dorm room type stuff all the way up to enterprise all the way up to the large scale access points for people who are you know starting to look into doing location analytics with with RFID tagging and all kinds of the new technology surrounding that that is correct and and I don't think I would like to mention GFS so people may ask what is the difference between you know these different flavors or access points so the thing that you have to remember is that it's just a scale from a feature standpoint you know all the software features will support supported across these access points so for the 1800 series access points the scale is 50 access points 1000 coins and a single mobility expense deployment on the 2800 3800 series access points we can support a 400 access points 2,000 clients in a single mobility Express deployment and these are all indoor access points besides these access points mobility Express is also supported on the outdoor access points the 15:40 and the 1560 which are also 11ac wave two access points yes cuz one thing's for certain there aren't fewer clients out there with Wireless on them today so we talked a little bit about the access points and the different models that does any model support mobility Express or are we looking for something when we order them in order to make it a mobility Express access a great question Jeff so you know when you order access points from Cisco you order something with like a err ap 2800 k9 but if you want the access points to come preloaded with mobility Express software what you have to do is you have to order the air AP 2,800 k9 C so C is the is what you have to remember when you're ordering the mobility Express access points so when you order there's a difference Q which ends with the C and what that means is those ApS will come pre-loaded with mobility Express access point mobility Express software code from the factory okay and do all the models have to be C models or just one of them so you can you need in order to run the controller you need at least one with the C model so that can run the controller but if you have additional cap of ApS they can actually join this controller that is running ok and do all the access points have to be the same model as the version it's running the sea so you can always go mix-and-match if you don't have to have the same models I mean you can have 2800 and mix with 1815 or the 1830 and even outdoor a piece you know you can always go mix and match that's great because there's a different access point for a lot of different environments a lot of different situations what you're running in the front office might not be what you're running back you know by your MRI and your x-ray machines you know that different situations different access points so you mix and match you got a lot of leeway to pick your network design and the right access point for each environment so that's great now one of the questions that we get asked a lot you know we hear a lot about Meraki and SMB and a lot of the different Cisco solutions it but we know that you know there's certain times where one might fit a little bit better into a particular scenario and can you tell us a little bit you know what looking at Meraki looking at mobility Express you know when is when is the right tool for the job going to be mobility expressed sure great question Jeff so if the customer has a cloud for strategy and they're okay with the subscription cost position Meraki I mean it's a great Wi-Fi solution if cost is a concern to the customer I'm their cost conscious customers out there they want to deploy a set and forget type of Wi-Fi deployment position mobility Express if the customer needs the control function to be locally present in the premises and they want redundancy position mobility Express if the customer needs advanced WLAN and RF features maybe there's a need for a high-density deployment maybe there is a need for interference detection using Cisco clean air position marbury Express with all the advanced features and everything if they want a simple UI dashboard to set up and manage position mobility Express and that brings up another good question a clean air I'm a huge fan of Cisco clean air just because of how well it mitigates interference with that full spectrum analyzer that's built into it does mobility Express give you the capabilities yes it does it does with the twenty eight hundred thirty eight hundred and the 4,800 the cleaner chipset is already built into the hardware so if I deploy Moberly Express with these APs you will get the cleaner capability right so you're getting maximum interference mitigation here so you said this is simple you said this was clean and easy to set up yeah can you show it yes so what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually set I'm going to show you how to set up using a Cisco wireless app which is available for your Apple and Android devices and it can also be set up using the web UI but I'm going to show it to you how to do it why this is go wireless app excellent let's take a look at that okay so mobility Express can be deployed in a few easy steps first we'll create the admin account for the wireless controller second we configure the system parameters such as system name selecting the country considering time and we'll also configure the management IP address of the wireless and controller and as a last step will create an employee mm so what I've done is I have powered up the mobility Express access points all three of them that you see on the table and after power up one of the APS will be elected as a master which will run the controller function and it will broadcast the provisioning SSID call the Cisco err provision so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna actually use my iPhone and I'll first connect to the Cisco err provision SSID when prompted for password I'll enter password as password and that would help me connect to the SSID I'll then open up the Cisco wireless app on my iPhone and click on the provisioning icon and this will start the setup wizard as you can see the first step is to configure the wireless control admin account and I'll just do that I'll create it as a simple as a simple one for this demo as a second step you know I'll configure the system information so I'll enter the system name let's just say it's ami WLC I'll then select the country from the drop-down list which is United States and I'll scroll down I'll then select the time zone and let me select the Eastern Standard Time next i'll configure the management IP address for the wireless LAN controller Solent to the IP address 1010 110 I'll enter the subnet mask followed by the Gateway and once I'm done that as the last step I'll create the wireless network and let's just call it dnh for security or select PSK and i'll enter the passphrase at this point I'm actually done but optionally what I can also do is I can enable RF parameter optimization and under advanced settings I can select the client density and the traffic type again this is optional it's not mandatory and one can also do this you know from the controller UI in day one finally let's click and submit the commit to commit the changes and what this will do is it will cause the master ap to reboot and it off and after it comes back up it will run the controller function and the remaining two ApS that you see on the table will actually connect to this controller so that was pretty easy simple interface nice and easy walk through and you did that all from your phone yes that's pretty straightforward so I got to tell you what other features are we gonna get from mobility Express because we get a lot of questions about you know can I set up a guest land umbrella and security is everywhere all kinds of questions about security you know can we integrate that and you know application visibility and controller these all features that mobility Express can handle yes chef so you know guess is a big piece for some FM bees right so we have multiple guest options that are supported you can do in Chrome web or you can do well to the external splash pages so we have a full support for gifts turbulent options and I'm starting with a two-timer one umbrella integration is also supported with mobility Express so you can apply umbrella policies to your guests Debu lands so let me ask you this because we always get asked this question too as simple as it is to set up as nice and clean as the interfaces are right what about the guys who want to get in there and turn all the knobs we want to go in there and really dig deep they need those advanced features can they still get to them absolutely you know so this is an this an enterprise class product from Cisco for small to medium businesses we have those advanced knobs for the RF geeks so you can go into the expert view and then you will have access to all the advanced knobs that they need to fine-tune the deployment we can ask that all the time you make it nice and simple but there still people that just need to go in there and they need to adjust yes you know some of those crazy settings why don't you show us what some of these features look like I mean I'd love to see how easy they are to say sure let me show you how to do that okay so Jeff we set up the mobility Express using the wireless app now what I'm going to do is I'm going to log into the controller dashboard using my web browser so I'm going to come in here open up the browser and enter the controller IP address that had configured from the mobile app so it's HTTP 10 10 110 so the first thing that I'm presented with is to log in and I'm going to enter my controller credentials that had configured again when I was setting up using the mobile app so after login you basically come to the landing page and what you see on the landing page is it is actually mobility Express controller and on the left side you have the navigation pane to go into the monitoring and the provisioning windows and on the right side what you see is a network summary which shows you how many wireless networks are configured we configured one wireless network during the initial setup so we it shows as one and then we have three access points on the table so it shows a it shows all the three access points and what it also shows is a list of active clients in both the bands two point four and five in this case my laptop is connected to the dnh SSID and so is my iPhone so you actually see two clients connected at five gigahertz and we can also see the the number of robes and interferers in this case right now we don't have any interferers and in the lab here scrolling down you have these beautiful widgets the first widget shows you the access points by usage so you know I have these three access points and it kind of shows you what the usage is I can also click on the tabular format and it kind of shows you the numbers coming to the right side as you can see it shows the list of clients that are connected to the mobility expect work what are the different operating systems that they are using what is the usage of these individual clients and things like that like I mentioned before you know application visibility and control is supported on mobility Express what you're seeing in this budget is a list of applications that the clients are actually browsing it shows you the top ten list of applications that the clients are browsing and if let's say I wanted to apply control to one of these applications it's quite simple all I need to do is just click on the application select the action the type of control that I would like to apply let's say I want to drop this and select the WLAN and that's it so you selected them alone and you hit apply and that's pretty much it in terms of the operating systems as I said you know it shows you a list of operating system and also in and it also shows you the number of clients for that corresponding app operating system now let's take a look at the access points so we have three access points let me click on one of them so when I look at the access point details you know I can actually get information about what is the MAC address of the access point what is the IP address what switch is it connected to what is the interface on the switch site it is connected to things like that it also shows the capability of this access point in terms of you know it's 11 and 2.4 you know max data rate is 144 and things like that on the right side when looking at the performance summary I can see performance summary for both the bands 2 point 4 and 5 and it shows me the list of channels that is being used in each of these bands so on the 5 gigahertz you know I'm using channel 52 56 60 and 64 there is no II client connected to this access point so what I'll do is I'll actually go to another access point that has a client so let's click on the other one and this access point has one client connected at five acres as you can see here it also shows me the ference like the channel utilization and interference about 2.4 and 5 gigahertz so as you know we have free access points on the table here and one of them is actually running the controller function and it happens to be the 2800 series access point let's say we want to have a bit of control over which one would be elected as a master if for whatever reason you know the 2800 let's say goes down or you know maybe we want to change the master from the 2800 to another AP that we have here how can we do that so let me show you how to do that you go to wireless settings click on access points and what you will see here is the first access point which is the 2800 it has a P I con which means that is actually running the controller function right now and it says primary controller if I want to change the controller to let's say the 1815 I what I can do is I can click and edit the AP and I can click on make me controller and what this would do is it would right away move the controller from the 2800 to this 1859 additionally what I can do is I can actually set it as a preferred master and what that does is if let's say whatever the 2800 goes down 1815 I would be selected as the next master you don't want the system to select the master you want the user to define you know which ap should be elected as a masters in that case you want to come in here and set the preferred master and you basically can apply button and once you do that you know the next preferred master would be shown with a grey P icon looking at the clients so let's say I go to one of the clients and this is my laptop as you can see it shows me the details about the access points sorry about the clients you know what the MAC address is what is their Society this client is connected to what is the operating system it also shows me how this client actually got connected shows me the applications that this particular client is actually browsing and the usage the different type of security and policies that this client is using things like that moving on to best practices so on mobility Express one of the things that I want to mention is when you provision mobility Express the wireless best practices majority of them are already enabled out of the box and we do this because when you have small to medium customers they may may not have an IT staff who is an expert at Wi-Fi so to give them an optimal starting point from an RF and the Wi-Fi standpoint what we do is we enable majority of the best practices by default and as you can see here 24 out of the 32 best practices are actually enabled let me now show you how to create a WLAN and what I'll do is I'll create a guest double on so to create a WLAN what I need to do is I need to go into the wireless settings on the navigation pane click on the blue lens once I'm here I click on the add new WLAN button and I can enter let's say in a society and I'll call it dnh guest if I want the operating system of the clients to be determined I can click on local profiling I click on security and this is a guest network that I'm trying to create so I'll an able guest network and what that does is it basically changes the options that are available for the guest turbulence captain network assistant I'll enable it because you know there may be i phone clients and for this WLAN i'll just select the captive portal as the internal splash page and access type is just web consent for application visibility and control I can click on traffic shaping come down and enable application visibility and control and I'll hit apply and now my guest every line is created it's as simple as that the next thing that I want to show you is I would like to do umbrella integration with mobility Express and I would like to create a profile and apply the profile to the DNA G guests WLAN that I've just created so in order to integrate mobility Express with the umbrella what I need to do is I need to first go into the expert view so let's talk about what expert view gives you so the flows in mobility Express the screens are pretty simple and they have limited options but for those RF or the Wi-Fi deep if they want to have some advanced knobs and whatnot what they can do is you can click on the expert view on the top here and what it does is it actually changes the screens or the UI's at the back so once I once I am in expert view I can come to the navigation pane and I see that there is a new option called services and I go to services and I click on umbrella because that is what I want to do so what I've done here is I've already copied the umbrella API token and what I'm going to do is I'm going to just enable the umbrella service on mobility Express and hit apply so once I do that you know mobility Express is already talking to the umbrella in the cloud and my next step is to actually create an umbrella profile that I would register or I would map it to a WLAN the the dnh guess turbulent that I just created so to create an umbrella profile I click on the add profile and I'll just call it guest and I'll hit apply and what this is going to do is it is going to try and register this profile with the umbrella in the cloud and as you can see that the profile is already registered it happens pretty pretty quickly now that I have created my umbrella profile what I'm going to do next is go back to my dnh guest WLAN so I go to wireless settings WLAN and I'm going to edit this because I want to map my umbrella profile to this table and so let's just say yes and as you can see you know we enable the expert view so we have a lot more options here so to map the umbrella profile to this mm I'll click on the Advanced tab and I was cooled down and for the umbrella profile what I'll do is I'll select guest because that is what I named my profile to be the next thing that I'm going to do is I can change my umbrella mode to forced and what this does is so you know if you have umbrella enforcement clients can always go and change the IP addresses on their client devices to avoid umbrella enforcement but if you change the umbrella mode force even if the client changes the IP address the DNS IP addresses on their client devices umbrella will always be enforced and the next thing is to basically simply hit hit on the apply button so the umbrella integration is basically a couple of steps one is you start the service you create the profile register the profile and then you map the profile to the regulan and you're pretty much done the next thing that I would like to talk about are the upgrade options so mobility Express supports a whole bunch of different upgrade options so in order to look at the software upgrade options I go to management software update and for the transfer mode as you can see I have the option of upgrading the mobility expressed deployment using HTTP FTP SFTP or even cisco.com so if the mobility Express is connected to the Internet you know one can actually update software directly from Cisco comm if you have the same kind of access points in the mobility Express Network the simplest way to actually update is to use the HTTP transfer mode and when you do that all you need to do is you basically browse to the local AP image on your laptop let me show you some of the RF knobs so given we are an expert view we can actually see the advanced RF parameters so as you can see here you know you can enable 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz at the global level you can enable flexible radio assignment or disable it by default it's enabled you can enable even driven REM clean air reduction which is also enabled by by default and in terms of the channel width and the data rates you can end the channels you can actually customize this so these are the advanced RF knobs that are available to / experts if they want to further find you in their network and what you're seeing right now is actually the default view of the RF parameters we also support RF profiles so by default the system actually has 6 built-in RF profiles for low typical and high density for both 2.4 and 5 but you can also always create RF profiles let's say you want to create your own high-density or a profile you can create that and then apply to the AP groups I also would like to show you some things about security settings so mobility Express supports both preauth and post hot ackles IP based as well as DNS based so you can come in a security settings you can create ackles and you can create it for ipv4 ipv6 and you can also add bass rumble IP rule as well as URL rules and once you have created these ackles you can apply to the devlins so the next thing that I want to show you is I'm going to show you how to look at some of the tools that the controller has so I'm going to click on controller tools and under advanced from the navigation menu on the left and I'll go into troubleshooting tools so here you know it basically shows me what are my DNS servers that are configured on the network I can also do a ping test or a DNS test if I have a radius integration with mobility express I can also check you know if the mobility Express connected to talk to the radius server or not using the tool that is that I'm showing here in terms of configuration management we can always export the configuration out from the controller to your local machine and we can also import a configuration so if you had multiple sites and pretty much all that sites are cookie cutter models you could create a configuration and you can import the configuration at each of the sites that is running mobility Express there is another thing that I want to mention which is migrated Cisco mobility Express deployment so let's say you're running 100 AP deployment with mobility Express and now there is a need to go to let's say hundred-twenty access points so you need to buy 20 more access points and deploy them well with mobility Express you can go to a maximum of 100 so to go to one 120 you may have to go to a controller base deployment let's say a 3504 with support 250 access points but your investment into the mobility Express access points is actually protected so you don't have to buy a hundred twenty you just buy 20 additional cap web access points and what you can do is you can use your mobility Express access points come here enter the new controller come here enter the new controller IP address and the controller name and it and hit migrate so in just one click you will move all your mobility Express access points to this appliance let's say 3435 for based deployment well that was pretty neat looking you gonna have to show us a lot of the great features very easy to use it can get advanced if it needs to you know is that the only management option for mobility Express no so we you know we should you the mobile app be sure the web browser-based UI interface but if you have a multi-site mobility Express deployment we have full support in DNS center and prime as well so if you are using Dana center to manage mobile Express you actually get both automation as well as assurance care okay so it can really grow with you absolutely okay just starting out and then moving up through DNA Center exactly so if you have a smaller deployment you can use the wireless app or the web UI but if you have a multi-site deployment go with DNS Center or Prime absolutely well I got at a thank you very much for joining us today Rashad great great learning on this you know in the end what's the best value to SMB for mobility Express right right so for SMB the best value is they don't really have to buy a controller hardware you know the controller function runs on the access points dinner they don't have to invest in the controller hardware up to hundred access points right these access points are pretty affordable and you don't need any eight license on a controller base deployment you need ap licenses but for mobility Express there is no license so when you buy the access points with mobility Express support you are good to go excellent well thank you again thank you very much for joining us please stay tuned after for the QA where you can answer where we will answer any of your questions that you have on this particular subject matter you can put your questions in the bottom in the Q&A box and we'll all be here to answer them for you thank you you

Channel: D&H Distributing

Views: 16,175

Rating: 4.951807 out of 5

Keywords: D&H, dandh, d and h, cisco, mobility express, var, value added resller, smb, small medium business, webcast, training, virtual, technical, professional, networking, solutions, wireless, wifi, mobile, easy to install, security, harrisburg, pa, channel, Rajat Tayal, Jeff Hunt

Id: 6CSG0BCB8jM

Length: 31min 13sec (1873 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2019