Understanding How To Add Access Points to a Wireless Network By Using Network Director
There are two ways to add an access point to your wireless network. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages as shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Adding Access Points to a Wireless Network With Network Director
Method | What You Do | Pros and Cons |
|---|---|---|
The controller discovers access points and provides the list to Network Director. You can convert any or all of these temporary configurations to persistent configurations. | Enable automatic access point discovery on a controller by following the directions Creating and Managing Wireless Auto AP Profiles. Convert the automatically discovered access points to persistent configurations by following the directions Converting Automatically Discovered Access Points to Manually Configured Access Points . (For an explanation of Auto AP profiles, see Understanding Auto AP Profiles.) | All access points in range are automatically discovered and listed first as access points on the controller and then as devices in Network Director. This method is very efficient. The drawback to this method is that non-company access points can be discovered and added if they are in range. You can overcome this drawback by converting the access points that belong to your network. |
You add an access point one at a time. | See Adding and Managing an Individual Access Point for directions for this method of adding access points. | Adding one access point at a time can be tedious if you need to add a large number of access points. However, adding one access point at a time from Network Director is more explicit because that method inputs more information and does more configuration. Controllers give preference to specifically configured, persistent access points over those access points using an Auto AP profile. If a configured access point is discovered by a fully utilized controller, the controller disconnects an access point using an Auto AP profile and accepts connection from the configured access point instead. |