Can someone confirm if cnMaestro Essentials is the controller like Cisco WLC or more like NMS like cisco prime? we want to have a controller based wifi setup and evaluating Cisco, Ruckus. One of our site is using cambium wireless and our management is quite satisfied with the performance so we are eagerly evaluating it, however the objection that came from competitors is Cambium doesnt support controller appliance, either the controller is embedded in APs or in cloud. Can someone confirm it?
Hello Harry,
The controlller is embedded in each AP. cnMaestro behaves as the NMS, with other features such as the guest WLAN hotspot, manage firmware upgrades, and configure AP Groups to manage zero touch deployments. You can also see connected clients, and their performance kpi’s.
cnMaestroX offers more features, such as longer term storage of kpi’s, report generators, assist and analytics features, and the guest hotspot can use a pay model authentication with Paypal or other popular services.
Cambium’s system does not use an external controller at all.
You can run cnMaestro on bare metal / vm hardware if you really dislike cloud management, though I’ve dealt with enough onsite hardware appliances and trying to keep them HA and working that it sitting in the cloud is a godsend for me.
In industrial non internet connected environments we’ve used Intel NUCs and Dell R720s to host cnMaestro.
cnMaestro is both a Campus Manager and Central Configuration Engine for your Cambium fabric so you can do observability,tshoot and config from one single pane of glass.