Aruba Shared Office Setup

[MIMARO]

Hi, I'm wanting to setup a shared office wifi access and am inclined to use the Aruba APs.

My questions is, in terms of security what would be the best practice. Should I have diferente SSIDs for each client and a VLAN for each SSID? 

How many SSIDs do the Aruba APs allow and does multiple SSIDs slow down the network?

Any insights would be appreciated.

Thank you

[Emil_G · Accepted solution]

Hello

If you intend to use Aruba APs and need advice about the design of an Aruba WLAN it is better for you to register and ask your question in the Airheads Community.

https://community.arubanetworks.com/

The section Comware Wireless/Unified WIreless of the HPE community handles a completely different product line which has nothing to do with Aruba. We can give only general advises about WLAN best practices.

Usually you configure a separate SSID for a group of clients not for each client. For example one SSID for employees, another for guests etc.

The VLAN separation can be based on SSID but it also be based on the results of the authentication. The RADIUS server can assign clients belonging to the same SSID to different VLANs.  But the Aruba APs and controllers also support the role base access control. Each user is assigned to a role which contains VLAN ID, firewall policy, rate limit etc. So even users within the same VLAN can have a different firewall policy and different access to network resources.

You can check the number of supported SSID per radio in the data sheet of the APs you intend to buy

https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/ds/DS_AP510Series.pdf

This is the data sheet of the Aruba 510 series and here it is stated that it supports 16 SSIDs per radio.

However the best practice is to keep the number of SSIDs to a minimum - max 3 to 4 SSIDs per radio. Using more than this number will increase the channel utilization in the environment. This in turn will affect the performance of the WLAN,