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Client Roaming Issues

martynch1
Level 1
Level 1

We are having a number of issues with client roaming and I need to clear something up from the report an external company has produced, one of their recommendations is to make sure that when users roam they do so at layer 2 and not 3.

 

Brief overview:

The building has 4 floors and each floor has a North and South Side.

Two WLC’s 5508 running 8.2.100.0

Each floor has in the region of 24 AP’s

The AP’s are split between controllers in a random fashion, 1 AP and its neighbouring AP may even be on different controllers.

One of the recommendation from this external company who have been in to carry out a survey is to have a controller per two floors, so WLC 1 would be used for floor 1 and 2 and WLC 2 for floors 3 and 4, then make sure that the AP’s are tied to the correct floor controllers.

 

The reason they recommended this was for the roaming, its best practice to roam at layer 2 and not layer 3.

The other problem we are facing is with another of our sites which homes two separate sectors of a company who have now purchased their own WLC.

Brief Overview:

Building has two floors

Ground Floor is public access with public Wi-Fi

First floor houses Corporate staff.

 

Before the ground floor purchased their own controller the public SSID was anchored back to another controller for the internet access and the staff SSID just connected to our WLC 1 and 2.

 

Now they have purchased their own WLC to move them off our WLC 1 and 2 (still anchored to a WLC that has public access) it’s been suggested that we set the site up in the following way

 

All staff on the first floor (public) use the site public WLC and the staff on the first floor (corporate) WLC 1 and WLC 2. All 3 controllers are on the same network.

Is this ideal or would it be better if the entire site uses that sites WLC and group the AP’s per floor.

Thanks

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

The AP’s are split between controllers in a random fashion, 1 AP and its neighbouring AP may even be on different controllers.
One of the recommendation from this external company who have been in to carry out a survey is to have a controller per two floors, so WLC 1 would be used for floor 1 and 2 and WLC 2 for floors 3 and 4, then make sure that the AP’s are tied to the correct floor controllers.

Yes, it is not a good idea to split APs nearby between multiple controllers. I would not split APs in each floor to different controller, rather put all of them in a single controller (if you need redundancy, you can make second WLC as HA to the first WLC)

Even in the 2nd scenario, I would think put all corporate users APs to same controller is best in roaming perspective. Public SSID can be anchored to Guest Anchor WLC

HTH

Rasika

*** Pls rate all useful responses ***

View solution in original post

1 Reply 1

The AP’s are split between controllers in a random fashion, 1 AP and its neighbouring AP may even be on different controllers.
One of the recommendation from this external company who have been in to carry out a survey is to have a controller per two floors, so WLC 1 would be used for floor 1 and 2 and WLC 2 for floors 3 and 4, then make sure that the AP’s are tied to the correct floor controllers.

Yes, it is not a good idea to split APs nearby between multiple controllers. I would not split APs in each floor to different controller, rather put all of them in a single controller (if you need redundancy, you can make second WLC as HA to the first WLC)

Even in the 2nd scenario, I would think put all corporate users APs to same controller is best in roaming perspective. Public SSID can be anchored to Guest Anchor WLC

HTH

Rasika

*** Pls rate all useful responses ***

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