Cisco WLC Interfaces

Ports on a WLC are physical interfaces. below are the different types of ports:
Service Port - RJ45 connection used for Out Of Band (OOB) management. It cannot carry traffic and is not auto sensing so it must connect to a switch access port and must have the correct cable. No default gateway can be set so the management station should be on the same subnet or a static route will need to be defined.
Console Port - standard DB9 console port
Utility Port - For future use
Distribution Ports - These ports are for controlling APs and network connectivity.

Interfaces on a WLC are logical and need to be mapped to a port. Many interfaces can be mapped to a single port. Interfaces are either predefined or user defined. user defined interfaces are dynamic and are used for VLANs for WLAN access. Predefined interfaces are static. Interfaces need to be on all controllers in the mobility group in order to ensure seamless roaming otherwise clients will drop and need to re-associate. Types of static interfaces:
Management - This interface is used for in band management for example connections to AAA and L2 communications to other controllers. This interface should be in a different subnet from the service port. This address is used for the GUI
AP Manager - This interface is used for WLC to AP communications at L3. This address is also the tunnel source address when packets are sent from the WLC to the AP and destination address visa versa. It should be in the same subnet as the management interface. If the distribution ports are grouped in a LAG then only a single AP manger port is needed. All LWAPP traffic goes through this interface
Virtual - This interface is used to support Mobility Management (mobile client uses the same virtual IP address when roaming across controllers), DHCP relay (DHCP address for clients) and L3 security (redirect for the web page authentication).
Service port - This controls the above mentioned service port

Dynamic interfaces are also known as VLAN interfaces. They are user defined interfaces and are used to carry the data from wireless clients. They are created with the following details:
VLAN ID, Physical port assignment, DHCP server information, ACL information.
Dynamic interfaces can be assigned to many different types of ports: Distribution, WLANs, L2, management, L3 and AP manager interfaces. WLANs are associated with a SSID and dynamic interface. Up to 512 dynamic interfaces can be configured on a WLC.