Cisco Wireless HA box to box failover

[Steven Williams]

I am working on a design for wireless failover and I have an idea in my head and cant really see why it wouldnt work but im asking others.

If I have a WLC HA pair in two different geographically datacenters, Could I still set the IP of HA pair one at DC01 as primary and IP of HA pair one at DC02 as secondary so in the event the box to box failover doesnt work worse case scenario the APs will failover to the secondary HA pair in DC02? Yes I know clients and APs would see disruption but I am planning as last resort. In the interim the box to box failover would work and we could repair the previous active controller before the 90 days is up on the HA-SKU controller. I guess this would be a failover event for complete Datacenter failure or WAN connections broke to remote sites.

[Steven Williams]

Right! Two pairs of SSO to make N+1 its a hybrid I am purposing it as. 

[Scott Fella]

Okay so with SSO, you have two co trollers and only one valid IP address. So now if you have 4 controllers with two pairs in SSO, you have two primary IP address. That means you would configure the AP high availability using the primary and secondary and leave the tertiary empty. It's up to you to decide on what controller will be primary for a specific AP.

Example:

Site 1

primary controller: WLCSSO1

secondary controller: WLCSSO2

Site 2

primary controller: WLCSSO2

secondary controller: WLCSSO1

-Scott 

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[Steven Williams]

Yes makes sense. So the only way I get an interruption with APs and clients is if the site thats slated for the primary of the AP goes down. 

I mean this seems to be a pretty sufficient design while providing the most uptime possible for all clients and sites. 

[Scott Fella]

That is correct as long as things are working fine. Now if the second SSO pair is just for backup, do you really need that to be SSO?  I can see if you will split the AP distribution between both, but it's up to how you want things designed. 

-Scott 

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[Steven Williams]

Yes we would distribute the APs geographically to each HA pair. So we just need to make sure licensing on each can accommodate the load that the other would migrate in the even of failure.