Posted on 11-21-2020 04:13 AM
tl;dr: what's the ideal VLAN/WLAN setup for lots of iPads and Apple TV's?
We have a relatively large campus network (K12 school): 2000 users, lots of iPads (1:1 and shared iPads), ± 70 Access Points (Ruckus R500, R510 and R550; ZoneDirector ZD1200 controller). We have ± 100 Apple TV's: a mix of 3rd and 4rth generation, ± half of them wirelessly connected to the network, the other half through ethernet. The backbone of our netwerk is robust and performant (2 x 10000gpbs uplink on all the access switches). Internet connection: fibre 500/500.
After lots of experiments with VLAN configurations and WLAN settings, we keep on struggling with the quality of audio/video streaming and Airplay mirroring from iPads and MacBooks to Apple TV's (drop outs, hickups, audio stuttering, connection drops and Apple TV disappears from list of devices, ...). So we have a couple of questions: if you could design a large campus network from scratch, what would be the ideal setup (VLAN's, WLAN's, ...) in order to have reliable WiFi, audio/video streaming and Airplay mirroring?
Things to consider:
- VLAN Apple TV's: apart from the wireless clients? Together with the wireless clients? Segmented into several smaller VLAN's in order to limit the number of Apple TV's per VLAN?
- VLAN wireless clients: apart from the Apple TV's, or together? Segmented into smaller VLAN's, per building/zone?
- What with Bonjour, mDNS, multicast and the cross-VLAN discovery of Apple TV's? How to publish the Apple TV's to another VLAN? How to limit the discovery, so that the clients don't get a list of 100 Apple TV's to choose from?
- WLAN recommendations: 2.4 and/or 5GHz? Channelization limits? Power? Band balancing? Advanced settings?
Any other best practices to make AirPlay reliable, any help or advice is greatly appreciated.
Posted on 11-21-2020 05:14 AM
Check this out https://hcsonline.com/support/white-papers/recommendations-best-practices-for-wi-fi-and-apple-devices
Posted on 01-03-2022 01:52 PM
My school has a very similar environment and experiences similar issues, have you been able to make any progress on them since your post a year ago?
Posted on 01-06-2022 02:43 AM
I'm afraid I can't say we totally solved the issues, but we did make a lot of progress. Some things we changed:
The situation got much better, but still, sometimes on certain locations we have a problem with certain types of streaming video. Sometimes we can solve this by factory resetting the Apple TV, but not always. It's still not clear what causes these problems.
Posted on 05-25-2022 11:10 PM
Interesting. I've been steadily plugging away on similar issues for the last year and a half and here are some insights of my own:
Firstly, for anyone browsing and reading this without a lot of background info, airplay has a split in it's functionality. There is airplay mirroring and airstream. Most of the documentation I have found regarding to this is either old, vague or reverse engineered so based on observation these are the characteristics.
With that out of the way, some issues that have cropped up which I believe we determined the cause of are as follows:
Attempting to connect to an apple TV multiple times in a given window can cause a state where the connection requests 'stack' and leave it visible but unresponsive to further connection attempts until rebooted.
Airstream in some versions of safari doesn't work on youtube unless the user is actually logged into a google account.
I've been experiencing trouble with detection on certain devices in certain locations and hadn't considered that it could be a VLAN issue, which in hindsight does explain a lot of the troubles I haven't been able to resolve.
Thank you for the information, I hope the observations I've written here are helpful to someone else.
Since they are based mostly on firsthand experience and inference, if someone with access to good documentation does pass by, please give it to me so I can see if I'm wrong!
Posted on 01-06-2022 06:50 AM
Thank you so much for that information.
Posted on 01-06-2022 08:18 AM
We don't experience that particular issue you're describing, but we don't use that many MacBook Airs. It's mostly iPads we are using.
Some other things to consider: