Anchor load balancing with different priorities

[Antonio Macia]

Hello,

Having two guest anchors, would be possible to load balance the traffic of different SSIDs between them by assigning different priorities to each WLAN? For example, anchor 'A' active for WLAN 'A' with priority 1 while anchor 'B' active for WLAN 'B' with priority 1. Each anchor would backup their partner with lower priority of 3 for the other SSID.

Regards,

[Antonio Macia]

Any ideas out there?

[sandjose_cisco]

There is no priority for anchor load balancing it is round robin

Should check with Escalation if this is in the road map , doable, it is that the selection of  anchor is done post association and before entering the DHCP in the state machine .

[Antonio Macia]

I'm a bit confused because according to the documentation:

"You can configure a priority to the guest anchor when you configure a WLAN. Priority values range from 1 (high) to 3 (low) or primary, secondary or tertiary and defined priority is displayed with guest anchor. Only one priority value is allowed per anchor WLC. Selection of guest anchor is round-robin based on a single priority value"

Although the priority is configured per WLAN, if only a single priority is allowed per anchor, then it should be the same priority for all the WLANs, correct? 

[sandjose_cisco]

I totally missed this , you are right there is a priority in place and it got introduced in 8.1 release  i was in pre-8.1 mindset

[aleopoldie]

Are you sure ?

Because I implemented both solution, and round robin is only when you have the same priority.

If you have different priorities, for example WLC Anchor A with priority 1 and WLC Anchor B with priority 2, traffic will be tunneled to the WLC Anchor A and if this WLC goes down, the WLC B will handle the client traffic.

Alex-

[Antonio Macia]

I understand that approach and seems to be the only one valid. However, since the documentation states that the priority is configured at the WLAN level, I was wondering if we can play with those values and make both anchors active but for different SSIDs. 

[Scott Fella · Accepted solution]

Priorities are meant to only have traffic sent to a controller that has the highest priority value.  For example if you have two data centers and you only want traffic to be sent to the primary DC but still have the other as backup. 

In your case in which you want to load balance traffic, you just leave it at default or set them to the same value and the algorithm will determine what anchor controller a client will be directed to.

-Scott 

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[Antonio Macia]

Thanks Scott.