Background

At my new $dayjob, we’re undergoing a migration/refresh to Juniper Mist which will encompass over 13K APs when the dust settles. If you’re reading this, you already know that just performing a 1:1 swap for that many APs requires a lot of planning and resources. And depending on the size of your team, things may move faster or slower, or you may opt to contract out some of the work that’s required. Now, some organizations with large deployments choose to refresh portions of their network on a yearly cycle, let’s say 20% per year over 5 years. For us, that would have been a pretty manageable 2600 APs per year. However, given the variables listed below, we’re having to move fast (I mean like Jimmy Johns fast), but our team is small so we’re also having to pull in more resources, including external ones which can result in inconsistencies if left unchecked.