9800-CL ESXi cluster / HA Redundancy port questions

[mqontt]

Hey Guys,

i'm coming up with some desing for a new deployment of vWLCs.

We'll have several vWLC hosted within our ESXi network cluster. Each HA SSO vWLC pair will be acting independently and serving some parts of the larger campus network with central switching of SSIDs.

My question is with regards to Redundancy connection for HA SSO members, between the ESXI network cluster members.

Does each vWLC HA SSO pair need to be on separate L2 segment for its redundancy connection? (diagram#1 each HA sso pair with its own VLAN for RP and then all RP VLANs trunked via L2switch in DC to other ESXI node)

Or can they share a single segment ? (diagram#2 - one redundancy VLAN  serving all HA sso members on that ESXI and then direct connection to other ESXI) - would this even work ?

thanks!

[marce1000]

  - In principle , from the 9800-CL's viewpoint everything remains the same ,but I don't think the HA-SSO redundancy is officially supported , if it is being used on different hypervisor hosts (clustered or not). If it is being done , then the involved carrying vlan's must have the same vlan tag as the controllers use 'internally' for HA-SSO and the various vlans used (in human terms , the external vlans out of  ESXI and or in between must have the same vlan number). This may not be feasible always.

  Always advised when configuring 9800 controllers :
       -  Have an overall checkup of the  9800 controller's configuration with the CLI command
          show tech wireless and feed the output from that into Wireless Config Analyzer
          use the full command as denoted in green , do not use a simple show tech as input for this procedure

  M.

[marce1000]

      - Addendum : a number of useful command     in case of problems with HA SSO
show redundancy | i ptime|Location|Current Software state|Switchovers
show chassis
show chassis detail
show chassis ha-status local
show chassis ha-status active
show chassis ha-status standby
show chassis rmi
show redundancy
show redundancy history
show redundancy switchover history
show tech wireless redundancy
show redundancy states
show logging process stack_mgr internal to-file bootflash:
show platform hardware slot R0 ha_port interface stats

 M.

[marce1000]

 - Perhaps my original statement of being not supported between physical (different) ESXi hosts must be corrected:
   Have a look into https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/9800/technical-reference/c9800-cl-dg.html#9800CLnetworkinterfacemappings
                               (advising to read the section completely)

 Tx , M.

[Haydn Andrews]

With VM and non VM SSO where you need to use a redundancy VLAN as you can not directly connect. DO NOT use the same as other clusters. I have seen wierd things happen. The whole SSO using a non routed VLAN is basically to simulate directly connecting a cable between the two WLCs.