A 600-bed hospital is extending its SD-Access campus to clinical mobile carts that roam between floors. Policy must follow each wireless client, roaming must stay seamless inside the fabric, and IT wants centralized lifecycle control for switches, routers, and wireless. Which fabric wireless design aligns with Cisco Catalyst Center's role?

Fabric-enabled access points with a centralized controller managed by Cisco Catalyst Center are the right design: SD-Access wireless tracks endpoint identity, location, and scalable group tag in the control plane, so the overlay tunnel follows a roaming cart and policy travels without reauthentication or a subnet change. Catalyst Center also provides lifecycle automation for switches, routers, and wireless. Fabric-enabled access points joined to a highly available controller configured manually may support optimized roaming, but manual operation bypasses Catalyst Center provisioning, assurance, and host-tracking synchronization needed for centralized lifecycle control. FlexConnect access points with central authentication and local switching on each floor break traffic out locally rather than keeping it in the fabric overlay, preventing seamless in-fabric Layer 3 mobility despite preserving authentication. Catalyst Center-managed fabric-enabled access points using floor-specific VLANs fail to keep policy tied to the client: reassigning VLANs by floor changes the IP and authorization context, unlike the fabric’s scalable group-based portability. Exam caveat: distinguish centralized fabric wireless from FlexConnect, and do not confuse local-switching efficiency with overlay mobility. Practical check: in Catalyst Center, verify access points are in fabric mode, the controller is discovered and managed, and client assurance timelines show roams retaining the same IP address and group tag across floors.