Sorry if this has been posted before as I’m sure this is a common scenario but I was unable to find anything from searching.
I would like to replace some of my old hardware that doesn’t support VLANs with some that does. Also, if possible I would like to use CAPsMAN to configure the new hardware to simplify everything.
This is the hardware that I have currently, but needs to be replaced in 4 separate rooms:
2 wireless APs that function as both AP and switch for the room they are in
2 wired switches
Currently I have a RB4011 (not wireless) as my router that the new wireless APs and switches will need to connect to. Can the hAP ac² handle both functions of AP and VLAN switching or should I buy 4 switches (like RB260GS/RB260GSP) and have 2 dedicated APs (like cAP ac) connected to the switch? I know the hAP ac² runs RouterOS and not SwitchOS so I’m not sure about the performance differences for running VLANs through them. My network is relatively small, but I have about 30 devices that I would like to separate into different VLANs for security. I am looking for good performance for my small network. If there is a better way to accomplish my goal please let me know.
hAP ac² can switch wire-speed … including VLANs. Not on all ports simultaneously though, it’s limited by 2Gbps interconnect between switch chip and CPU.
It could do it if things are configured in HW (including VLANs) but personaly I don’t recommend it as my piece was unstable when I it. If VLANs are configured as bridge vlan-filtering (that’s in software), the device runs rock-solid and still performs nicely.
When you saying acting as AP switches in the room, I would go with MKXs advice. I have capACs in two locations but this is for wifi only as they are designed to be on ceiling or on wall, and thus not conducive to switch functionality. So it depends what you need and where you want it an footprint etc and where you have access to walls and ceilings.
Awesome, thanks for the advice! So I should be good with two hAP ac² and two RB260GS (either a switch or an AP in each of the four rooms)? My only concern was whether the hAP ac² would have performance issues using software filtering with bridge vlan-filtering. I read a post about someone having a 90-95% CPU load when doing a single file transfer between two PCs with VLAN software filtering enabled on the hAP ac². I definitely don’t want to have performance issues down the road, but also don’t want to have both a switch and AP in the two rooms that need WiFi if I could get away with just a single hAP ac² in those two rooms.
I wouldn’t either I was saying I need two APs in my house (on opposite ends), but each room in my house will need either a switch or an AP with a switch built in so that the wired devices in those 4 rooms could connect to the network. Something like this:
As I wrote, my tests show that hAP ac2 is capable of switching wire-speed and CPU load remains well below 100%. My tests were done using iperf (single stream and multiple parallel streams).
But then … hAP ac2 is a ROS device and as such it’s only too easy to mess with the configuration … in a sense that device still works, but consumes un-holy amount of CPU resources.
If your budget is not too tight and you don’t actually need the SFP port (available on CSS106 - that’s the new marketing name of RB260GS), I’d go with 4 pieces of hAP ac2 … you could run 5GHz WiFi on all units and optionally lower Tx power not to create excessive interference. And it would allow you to unify hardware and setup.
I was saying I need two APs in my house (on opposite ends), but each room in my house will need either a switch or an AP with a switch built in so that the wired devices in those 4 rooms could connect to the network. Something like this: