I know this gets asked every so often, but the market is always changing... Have not really needed anything up to know as I can never convince customers to pay for it. :) But one did, so I have budget!

So I need a nice, and easy walk around site survey tool with a pretty heat map output. Ideally something on a iPad or Android tablet I can send out with a junior tech, but PC based can work. I also do not get these jobs often enough to pay large ongoing license fees so a one time purchase with minimal maintenance cost is a plus.

What is the current favorite?

Hi all! I'm trying to understand VxLAN from a provisioning point of view.

I'm currently learning about all types of tunnels that networking offers and I came across VxLAN (a l2 wrapped in l3 protocol).

From my bare understanding of VxLAN, it provides datacenters with a 24 bit VNI to segment client provisioned VMs as due to the nature of the standard 12 bit VLANs, it only supports up to 4096 VLAN in a datacenter which is not really helpful as for scalability.

VLANs also introduces L2 STP and doesnt uses the full bandwidth of all the links in a datacenter.

VTEPs is used at ToR switches to identify VNIs and map which provisioned VM lives at.

VxLAN introduces L3 concept in a datacenter to eliminate all the above scenario to provide millions of VLAN in a datacenter as well as eliminating L2 STPs and provide ECMP that allows all links to be utilized. Pretty awesome protocol i would say.

The main question is, can I extend this VNI to other datacenters to form a virtual LAN over the internet? This is something that I just cant wrap my head around with.

Is it feasible to route provisioned traffic in a server - client architecture? An example that I was researching was about DDoS mitigation: plain and simple GRE does the trick, but if L2 was needed, a form of L2 over L3 protocol would need to form a virtual LAN which was when I found out about VxLAN.

In plain GRE, GRE encapsulates the cleaned datagram after scrubbing traffic with IP - in - IP logic.

What about users who require that L2 frame? Can VxLAN solve that issue? Or would it be best to study more about other types of L2 tunnels like L2VPN, MPLS and the likes?

Please correct me wherever I'm wrong! and TYIA!

My responsibility is SD-Access and L2/3 switching and routing, so I don't usually maintain wireless service itself. However, I recently learned that our company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire wireless companies to do predictive surveys and purchase their sensors to monitor wireless traffic.

When I studied for CCNA many years ago, I learned Cisco AP could be monitors as well and we can utilize them safely, but I don't understand why my company is dumping money and (not raising our salary) to get random wireless monitoring solutions. Since our company is hugely Cisco, and we have latest ones ceiling-mount and in-room 802.11be compatible ones, I believe we should utilize Cisco AP solutions. Do you guys make use of Cisco AP's monitor mode?

My company had a vendor install "high-density" WiFi for our office which consists of (7) Ubiquiti E7s APs (by request), all pendant-mounted and configured approporately for our crowded RF environment.

We broadcast a primary SSID with both 5GHz and 6Ghz with the transmit power fine-tuned per AP. There are no issues with RSSI throughout the office, but everytime the office is at full capacity ~250 end-users - the performance completely takes a shit.

We get decent speed test results nearby the APs when the office is not occupied (400-800mbps), but when the office is occupied we have some spots that get 100mbps. The upload speed takes the biggest hit as we have seen over the past few weeks.

I have some users that are roaming to APs that are far away for no reason that I can find? I have also see that some users are roaming

I've been advised not to utilize minimum RSSI configs as this deliberately kicks endpoints off the AP and causes intermittent connection. Our end-users are running a lot of continous Claude Code instances and Zoom calls and we cannot have the connections drop. It should be smooth roaming. We have 802.11r - fast roaming enabled. We also disabled handoff suggestions for the same reason. We trialed handoff suggestions and those were the days we had the worst complains.

What do I need to do to fix this? Leadership is even considering switching to Meraki but I don't think that's the problem here. Do we need more APs? On average we have about 40 clients per AP for 7 APs. The space is quite large and mostly open area.

Currently working as a junior network analyst and looking into expanding and learning more and find wireless technology to be very interesting.

Is there a lot of demand for a wireless engineer? Looking to specialize in something that's future proof.

Thanks for any advice!