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What is tunneling?

There are two ways to drop your packets from your APs onto your network; Local breakout and tunneling (central breakout).

If you use local breakout your AP will drop the packets straight to the connected switchport.

Tunneling will encapsulate the packets and send them to the tunnel endpoint, the tunnel endpoint decapsulets the packets and drops them to the switchport.

Pros

• only a few switchports to manage for breakout
• VLANs have to be only on the tunnel endpoint switchports
• you don’t need the VLANs on all AP switchports
• traffic is separated from your other network

Cons

• you need a tunnel endpoint device
• single point of failure, even if the endpoint is a cluster, if the cluster fails, tunneling fails
• overhead for encapsulation
• costs, if the tunnel endpoint is not included in you controller, you need separate hardware/VM

My conclusion

Tunneling or not depends on you setup, budget and time you want to spend managing the network.