topic Re: How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L in Wireless

How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L

Manish Manwal — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 13:04:39 GMT

I am going to configure SSO on two cisco 9800 WLC with RMI+RP.

how i can test the failover of the wlc?

reboot the primary controller and then second controller, is this the correct way to test it??

Re: How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L

Mark Elsen — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 13:50:25 GMT

- There are a few commands which will give you a pretty good idea on the current health of HA SSO setup :

test wireless redundancy rping

show chassis ha-status local
show chassis ha-status active
show chassis ha-status standby

show redundancy
show redundancy states
show chassis rmi

Re: How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L

Leo Laohoo — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 23:50:35 GMT

Pull the power of the WLC.

Re: How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L

mohammedshahidali88 — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 05:15:26 GMT

WLC#show chassis rmi
WLC#show redundancy

It will show you the redundancy status.

To Test, You have to reload chassis 1 and check the services are moved to secondary and everything works fine and AP's & clients move to secondary WLC. And check redundancy status as well.

Seondary WLC will be showing as an ACTIVE.

To reload the chassis use below command
WLC# redundancy force-switchover

Re: How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L

Haydn Andrews — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 21:33:03 GMT

For new setups I always follow a test plan involving:

Having clients connected to the wireless and active pings and video streams going to test what client impact is

Test failover using the redundancy force-switchover command

Pull power of the primary WLC

Recover primary

Pull power on secondary

then I do things like

if able to killing upliked switch, or atleast the switch ports

kill RP port

Re: How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L

craiglebutt — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 13:16:06 GMT

Just want to jump on this band wagon, I've simulated by shuttiing the uplink pot on disribution, issue is when I bring it back again, the WLC then locks the uplink port and have to console in to no shut it. This is why want to use OOB for it, but that doesn't work as both boxes use the same IP Is this correct. So only way round is a rs232 serisal to RJ45 IP so can access from console, is this only practical soulution?

Re: How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L

Scott Fella — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 14:53:14 GMT

Console is really what you should have for OOB. The RP ip can also be accessed with limited configuration, the management is shared, so only the active can be accessed with that.

Re: How we can test the HA Failover of cisco 9800L

fatirsahi530 — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:22:42 GMT

Yes, rebooting the primary WLC is a common and straightforward way to test failover in an RMI+RP setup. When you reboot the active (primary) controller, the standby should automatically take over. Just make sure: SSO is fully configured and synced between both controllers. You're monitoring client session continuity and AP failover behavior during the test. After testing the primary failover, you can also reboot the secondary (while the primary is back online) to validate failback.