DNA Center and 9800 landing WLC

[stefan.tabell]

Hi,

For a customer with three 9800-80 (17.6.4) HA-pairs and DNA Center (2.3.3.5) we are looking for a way to have the APs join a landing controller, after which we can re-assign the AP to another WLC though DNA Center.

Rather than having different option 43 in the DHCP scopes we want to use the same landing controller for every location on campus. This means that all the APs should join our landing WLC first.

From here we want to move the APs from the landing controller to a new controller using DNA Center. I guess this needs will need to be achieved by somehow configuring the High availability on the AP to use the new controller.

Seeing the very high amount of APs in this network it is not a feasible solution to manually go into every AP on the landing WLC itself to change it from there.

Anyone had a similar challenge as to this? Any ideas or suggestions of a possible approach? 

[Preston Chilcote · Accepted solution]

Go "Workflows" from Cisco DNA's main menu. Search for the "Configure Access Points" workflow.  Select the APs you want to configure.  On the next page, you can unselect all the of the parameters except for "Configure AP Parameters". There you will be able to choose the primary and secondary (and tertiary) WLCs that the selected APs will be configured for.  Note, that you don't actually type in the IP address, you will select the desired WLC from the available dropdowns.  That means the WLC needs to be discovered into inventory and assigned to a site.

[usaf_27]

Curious why you wouldn’t do DNS discovery for your wireless AP?  Then you could simply just claim them to whatever site you needed to. I highly suggest this as you could pre-claim several locations at a time and let them auto claim the night of the activity.  

[stefan.tabell]

Hi usaf, the amount of APs and AP management subnets (sites) makes this impractical. We need to have the land on the same controller, and then we can use the workflow as Preston explained to get them to the correct WLC.

[usaf_27]

To get to the landing the controller you must have routable subnets in place already. All you have to is setup an alias pointing to DNAC. All your new AP’s would go direct to DNAC when they boot during the PNP process.  I’ve done over 2,000+ AP’s this was without the need of a landing controller.  

[stefan.tabell]

Hi usaf! That sounds interesting! This is a non-fabric environment but would it work the same way anyway?

Technically, can you explain what happens when the AP discovers DNA Center? Does DNA point the AP to a WLC or does the AP actually associate with the DNAC? What is the difference between using option 43 and alias to point to DNAC?

[usaf_27]

I as well am using a non-fabric environment. The difference between option 43 and Alias (DNS). 

Option43 = dhcp server tells your AP’s what the DNAC IP is. 

Alias (DNS) = The AP themselves looks up a specific name such has pnpserver.domain.net.  Which resolves to the DNAC appliance VIP address.  You can also setup several domains to point to the same DNAC.