Management

Ensuring that you have a robust management system in place is as important as its design and implementation. After you have installed the infrastructure, distributed the clients, and enabled the solution, you will have ongoing management to consider. This is especially important in large deployment, where it is not uncommon to encounter several thousand access points and tens of thousands of clients. It is therefore prudent to also consider this during the design and implementation phase. Chapter 8, "Management Strategies for Wireless LANs" covers this topic in much greater detail. However, a brief overview is provided here.

There are two facets to managing an enterprise-class wireless network:

• Managing the infrastructure

• Managing the clients

Managing the Infrastructure

Infrastructure issues will include configuration management, image (or firmware) maintenance, maintenance and security settings updates, and so on. Many enterprises will already have an existing network management solution in place. Ensure that your wireless infrastructure can be seamlessly integrated with this system.

Wireless networks also pose unique challenges, such as radio management, rogue AP detection, and radio optimization. Several wireless equipment manufacturers produce management toolsets specifically geared toward their WLAN products. If you choose to deploy these, you should consider how to integrate them with any existing network management platform you have and where to locate the management servers/appliances. (If you have a geographically dispersed environment, carefully decide where to place it in your infrastructure as it will have a direct impact on performance.) You should also ensure that your IT and support staff have appropriate training with the toolsets provided.

Retrofitting a management platform after your infrastructure deployment is complete will be both costly and resource intensive. It makes much more sense to consider this as part of the standard deployment process.

Managing the Clients

Client management is very important for all large-scale wireless deployments. As your WLAN grows and evolves, you will probably need to revisit client devices at some stage. Security settings may need to be changed, user and security profiles distributed or modified, or firmware and client software updated. If you have several thousand clients, this can be extremely resource intensive and therefore costly.

Although it is true that most of your client settings can be configured during the initial client distribution, you should also plan for some manner of updating and managing your clients in the future. Many corporations already have client management software available to handle their desktop systems, such as LANdesk, Altiris, Microsoft SMS, or Symantec LiveState. If appropriate, ensure that the existing client management platform can handle updating your wireless software. Alternatively, some wireless solution manufacturers provide administrative and management toolsets with their software that is dedicated to updating and managing wireless client software and devices. If you choose to use these, ensure that your support and desktop engineering staff are familiar with them.