Cisco Cisco 8510 Wireless Controller Guía De Información

Wireless Access Point Smart Licensing for Cisco 5520, 8540, and Virtual Wireless Controllers

Q&A

Cisco Public

What is the main difference between traditional

node-locked and RTU licenses and the new

smart licensing?

The traditional node-locked and RTU licenses are tied to a serial

number and reside on the wireless controller, while smart licenses

reside on the cloud portal. For smart licensing, the wireless

controller reports only the usage (how many access points are

connected to it). Since the licenses are not tied to a serial number,

they can be pooled across the same product families.

Since smart licenses are tied to a customer and

not to individual devices, does this mean the

customer will be able to pool

all their wireless

controllers’ access point licenses and use them

any wireless controller?

No. Although with smart licensing, the licenses are not tied

to a particular serial number, the smart licensing portal allows

wireless access point licenses to be pooled

only within

the same wireless controller product families. Among the

controllers that are smart license enabled, Cisco considers

the 5520 and 8540 to belong to the same product family, and

the vWLC to be a separate product family. So access point

licenses can be pooled across all 5520 and 8540 controllers.

Access point licenses can also be pooled across all vWLCs.

However, 5520 and 8540 access point licenses cannot be

pooled together with vWLC access point licenses.

Why are there separate product family pools

within smart licensing?

Note that the customer does not have to pay anything extra

for smart licensing, and it is primarily meant to ease license

management and monitoring. It is not designed to provide

extra entitlement benefits. Customers wishing to port licenses

across all wireless controllers should look at procuring Cisco

ONE Software licenses.

How does the pooling work?

All licenses bought by a customer for a particular wireless

controller product family are pooled together. A license from

the pool will be used when an access point connects to a

controller that has smart licensing enabled and belongs to that

product family. For example, say a customer buys 300 access

point licenses for the 5520 and has three 5520 controllers

(5520-1, 5520-2, and 5520-3) in the network. If 53 access

points are connected to 5520-1, the available license pool in

the smart portal will go down to 247 (300 – 53). These 247

licenses are available for 5520-2 and 5520-3 to use. If 5

access points are disconnected from 5520-1, 5 licenses will

be returned to the pool and 252 (247 + 5) licenses will be

available for 5520-2 and 5520-3 to use. If 270 access points

are then connected to 5520-2, the customer will go out of

compliance (using 270 licenses with only 252 available) and

will be notified. The network operations, however, will not stall

while the customer is out of compliance.

Does the smart licensing portal distinguish

between base and adder licenses?

No, the smart licensing portal does not distinguish between

base and adder licenses.

Does the smart portal support the use of Cisco

ONE access point licenses that the customer gets

as part of the Cisco ONE Software suite?

Cisco ONE Software license support is not available on the

smart portal in AireOS Release 8.2.