Cisco has released its latest Wireless LAN Controllers into market. Cisco 5700 series stand alone controller & 3850 WLC integrated catalyst switch. Both are IOS based & that’s the key difference to existing cisco wireless controllers (5508, 2500, WiSM-2, etc). Also address growing demand for high bandwidth requirement for upcoming 802.11ac ( Gbps to AP) wave.
Key highlights of 5760 series controller are given below. You can go through full feature list of this product from here.
• Wire-speed 60-Gbps throughput with services
• Up to 1000 access points per controller and 72,000 access points in a cluster
• Up to 12,000 clients per controller and 864,000 clients in a cluster
• Network traffic visibility through flexible NetFlow v9
With Cisco 3850, WLC functionality comes into Access layer & all CAPWAP tunnels from the AP connected to that switch are terminating on to that switch. This gives lots of flexibility to apply same QoS, Secuiry, Visibility for wired wireless traffic at the Access layer switch. Also this will bypass the bottleneck of bandwidth (8G max in the current version of controllers – 5508) as all wireless DATA traffic enter into network via 3850 switch uplinks (10G)
You can find 3850 switch data sheets from here.
Here are very good podcast from “nostringsattachedshow.com” about these new products.
mrn-cciew 
Hey Rasika ! I just finished my CCNP-Wireless and I find myself referencing your blog ALL the time to start slowly picking up CCIE-Wireless stuff, your multicast stuff is a tremendous help!. So please keep it up and I know you’ll pass!
I too saw the release of the 5760 WLC. And just for clarification, when they say ‘IOS-Based’, do they mean that its only configurable via the CLI ? The controllers now are that way too, although almost everyone uses the GUI. Or am I misunderstanding something ?
Thanks !
First of all , Congrats on your success of become a CCNP-Wireless. Well done!!!
No, it does not mean we have to use CLI, you can configure it using both GUI & CLI. The only difference is CLI commands are identical syntax which we used to have on IOS based routers & switches. Currently CLI commands are not like that (That’s because current WLCs are developed by a company called Aironet . In 1999 Cisco acquired this company, but they did not change the code syntax until recently they move to IOS)
Quick question in a cluster config for the 5700 controller I understand it can manage up to 72000 access points. Do I need a license for the cluster config? Any doc that makes reference to cluster configs?
Thank you,
Ivan