Supporting Autonomous APs

A typical scenario where autoprovisioning is used is when migrating a small branch office from autonomous APs to a controller-based solution. In this scenario, you use autoprovisioning to configure the new controller, but you also need to migrate the autonomous APs. For this purpose, WCS also offers limited support for autonomous APs. You can add an autonomous AP to WCS from Configure, Access Points, Add Autonomous APs. You need the autonomous AP IP address, Telnet credentials (username and password), enable credentials, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) write community (without SNMP, access to your autonomous AP will be severely limited).

Once added, the autonomous AP can be monitored almost like an Lightweight AP Protocol / Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points protocol (LWAPP/CAPWAP) AP, from Monitor, Access Point. Autonomous AP support is still limited. You can add the AP to a map, but cannot see its heatmap. You can send IOS commands to the AP using templates, but there is no dynamic and automatic AP management with radio resources management (RRM). The logic behind these limitations is that if your network has just a few autonomous APs, you do not need WCS. If you add autonomous APs to WCS, it is probably because you are in the process of migrating an autonomous network to LWAPP/CAPWAP. You may need to see the autonomous APs under WCS, but if you want to easily manage them, you will probably migrate them to LWAPP/CAPWAP.

Migrating an autonomous AP to LWAPP/CAPWAP is done in WCS 5.2 from Configure, Migration Templates. When defining a new migration template, you need to enter the template name and description, and then define migration options such as DHCP support (does the AP use DHCP or does it have a static IP address), whether the AP has to retain its hostname, the DNS server IP address, and so on. You also need to provide information about one controller through which the migration will occur (management IP address and admin credentials), along with the address of a TFTP server hosting the file to use for the migration. This file is an IOS-to-LWAPP/CAPWAP migration file specific to the AP type and that can be downloaded from Cisco.com.

After these elements have been defined, click Select APs and choose which autonomous APs to migrate (the autonomous APs must have been added to WCS before using the migration template), and then click Convert. WCS will connect to the autonomous APs using the credentials you provided when adding the autonomous APs to WCS and initiate a conversion to LWAPP/CAPWAP. The APs will then join a controller and appear as standard LWAPP/CAPWAP APs.

Notice that you can migrate autonomous APs to LWAPP/CAPWAP, but you cannot convert LWAPP/CAPWAP APs to autonomous mode from the WCS interface.