RUCKUS Virtual SmartZone - Essentials (vSZ-E)
NFV-based WLAN Controller for Mid-Size Enterprise

Overview:

Enterprise-Class Virtual WLAN Controller Designed to Run in the Cloud

WiFi is faced with growing challenges in delivering high-performance and reliable WiFi. Enterprises must meet consumer needs for high-density, flexibility, and cost efficiency. The RUCKUS virtual SmartZone - Essentials (vSZ-E) is a virtualized WLAN controller solution that meets these demands.

Designed for small, medium and large enterprises, the RUCKUS vSZ-E delivers the cost and flexibility of virtualization with the scaling capabilities of the SmartZone Software Platform. This new WiFi platform offers ‘WiFi-as-you-grow’- the capability for your network to grow with and adapt to the changing needs of your business and deliver an optimal wireless experience.

• Performance and scalability: Supports 1,024 APs and 25,000 WiFi clients per vSZ-E instance.
• Network Flexibility: deploy a virtual controller that addresses the particular scale and performance needs of your business and your network.
WiFi as you grow: easily transition from another SmartZone WiFi controller to either vSZ version with Smart Licensing.

The virtual SmartZone (vSZ) is a scalable and versatile WLAN controller designed to run in a private cloud deployment. It eliminates the difficulties enterprises experience with building, managing, and scaling up to very large-scale WLAN networks. The vSZ implements a whole host of new features that optimize the Wi-Fi deployment for the enterprise.

The vSZ can support over a thousand RUCKUS access points (APs) and tens of thousands of subscribers per virtual instance. The vSZ provides all control plane and management functions, with data plane traffic being routed directly from the APs to a separate WLAN gateway. This approach is consistent with the industry trend toward Software Defined Networks (SDN) that split out the control plane from the data plane.

The vSZ can be deployed as a private cloud to support one specific network deployment, or in a public cloud that can support hundreds or even thousands of managed WLAN networks. The vSZ can run on either VMware Esxi 5.5 and later or Hyper-V/Azure or KVM (CentOS 7.0 64 bit).

The hypervisor function creates the virtual machines (VMs) that the vSZ application can run on. As traffic and load increases, the hypervisor can obtain additional resources from the underlying hardware layer to meet the demand. These resources can later be released as circumstances dictate.

Virtualizing the SmartZone

Virtualizing the SmartZone involves running the vSZ application and its OS on top of either the KVM or the VMware vSphere hypervisor (see Figure 1). Virtualization enables a whole host of new capabilities including:

• Ability to dynamically add hardware resources as required to support the needs of a rapidly growing enterprise, enabling a much more efficient use of data center resources
• High availability by enabling the hypervisor to shift applications to different server modules to address failures. The vSZ application can also run in Active/Active mode for extremely high availability.

Figure 1: The vSZ runs on a virtual machine established by the hypervisor. It in-turn runs atop the physical x86 blade servers. When deploying the vSZ in a data center, the existing cloud service management and orchestration function can interface with the vSZ through an API.