Cisco 5508 Anchor Controller + 2504 Primary

[Jay_F]

Hi,

We've had an odd thing happen in that public wifi that we host at one of our offices has gone down since we had an office power outage. The primary wireless controller at the office has come back up as normal, however, even though in the mobility group members it is showing status as 'up', if I go to the anchor controller I can see the 'control and data path' are down for this particular controller. I went to the CLI on the anchor controller and ran show mobility status which again showed the primary wlc at this office as 'control and data path down'. i then did an mping from the anchor to the HA controller where this office is and received successful 3 replies. The HA controller status was showing as UP. I then mpinged the primary controller and received send count=3 and receive count=0. Thinking this would explain things, however I still dont understand, there are no firewalls in the way. I then tried to move the AP's off the primary to the HA in the view that public wifi would work. it didnt. I rebooted the primary wlc whilst users were connecting to the ap's off the HA controller. 

I suppose I could re-add the mobility group for the primary wlc at the office but not sure that would solve the issue. I'm beginning to think a bug in the 5508 anchor controller but cant be certain. Any further ideas I could try to explore?

[pieterh]

do I understand correctly that the primary controller is up and all the access points are registered to the primary controller?

then this is the one that needs to communicate with the anchor, not the HA backup

some remarks from the HA guide:

It is not possible to access the standby-hot controller through the controller GUI, Cisco Prime Infrastructure, or Telnet. You can access the standby-hot controller only on its console

When HA is enabled, ensure that you do not use the backed-up image. If this image is used, the HA feature might not work as expected:

When a failover occurs and the standby controller becomes the new active controller, it takes approximately 15 to 20 minutes to synchronize the database (AP, client, and multicast) between the two controllers. If another failover occurs during this time, the HA structures would not yet be synchronized. Therefore, the APs and clients would have to get reassociated and reauthenticated respectively.

Maybe the power outage was less than necessary for the failover to finish?

When the power outage was very short, the controller may not have fully initialized.

[Jay_F]

primary controller status is up and AP's were originally registered to the primary. If looking at the anchor controller I can see that the control path and data path to the primary are down. i'm not so considered with failing over to HA as that is what i was not trying to achieve, i wanted to see if I could get public wifi when the AP's were registered to the HA controller considering the path status was up. I'm now thinking this is a bug between the firmware installed on the 5508 anchor controller and the 2504 controllers.

[Scott Fella]

Is your 5598’s in SSO or N+1. I would just delete the Mobility Group one each and re-create them.  It’s also best to be on the same code version if possible. 

[Jay_F]

The 2504's and 5508 is in N+1. I tried to remove the the mobility group member but it said 'failed to deleted mobility group member' - any ideas ? That was my other thought to upgrade 5508 controller but this is vital, is there any way i can upgrade this without down time as all paths will be lost to all other WLC's anchoring off this. Also have 5520's in a SSO is there any advice here to upgrade with any downtime within working hours?

[RichardAtkin · Accepted solution]

You won't be able to delete the mobility group member if it has some anchoring config associated with it.  Remove the WLC concerned from the anchor config on the SSID, then you will be able to delete / re-create it.  Don't forget to put the anchor config back in place afterwards.