Licensing
Access points are licensed as Lite devices. An on-box Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) is a Standard device; the APs it manages draw against the Lite unit count.
| Device | License |
|---|---|
| On-box WLC (Cisco C9800, Aruba controller) | Standard device |
| Cisco AP (via WLC) | Lite |
| Meraki MR (access point) | Lite |
| Mist AP | Lite |
| Meraki MS (switch) | Standard device |
| Meraki MX (security appliance) | Standard device |
| Meraki Dashboard | None, not modeled as a device |
| Mist cloud | None, not modeled as a device |
An on-box WLC counts as a Standard device because Forward models it as a packet forwarder that sits in the data path: CAPWAP tunnels terminate on it and it switches wireless traffic onto the wired network. A cloud management plane (the Meraki Dashboard or the Mist cloud) is only a collection source, not a modeled device, so it consumes no license; the devices it manages are licensed individually. Aruba APs are not modeled as separate devices, so they consume no license, and an Aruba deployment counts as one Standard device per controller.
For the broader license model, see Licenses and the Licensing FAQ.
When access points are modeled
AP modeling is governed by Lite license capacity, not a manual setting. The system behavior is different across vendors:
- Cisco decides at collection, network-wide: if the organization has purchased no Lite capacity, the WLC's AP devices are never created and the WLC is not modeled as a controller. This gate checks only whether any Lite capacity exists, not per-AP counts.
- Meraki and Mist APs are always collected, then skipped during snapshot processing when they exceed the available Lite capacity.
Across vendors, the per-device Lite limit is enforced during snapshot processing, and a wireless controller is modeled only when all of its APs are licensed.