Lost VLAN Mapping on WLC 5508 (Flexconnect)

[jguandalini]

Hi guys, I have a WLC 5508 and some AIR-LAP1131AG-T-K9 all in flexconnect configuration.

The problem is that 1130 Access Points lost the VLAN Mapping configuration without reason, simple change the vlan mapping to 999 and I need to reconfigure that.

I search in some documents on cisco.com but I can't find anything about this issue.

Could you help me please?

Thanks guys.

[Scott Fella]

So here is the thing. Did your AP's happen to move/join another WLC? Typically when a FlexConnect AP changes its vlan mapping its due to this. All the WLC's in the mobility giupd needs to have the WLAN's in the same order (WLAN ID), then the AP Groups also need to be the same. What I have seen is that if an ap moves to another WLC that doesn't have one if the above, then the AP's vlan mapping changes to the WLAN interface that is configure which is vlan 999 for you.

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[jguandalini]

A strange fact, that I have some 3620 Access Points and never has the same problem. It's occurs only with 1130 Access Points.

And I have the same WLAN on both WLCs. AP Groups is also the same.

*The VLAN 999 is the dummy_vlan for all Access Points.

Thanks

[Scott Fella]

Yeah... I too use the vlan 999 as a black-hole vlan and that is when I notice the vlan mappings change.  So default is that if the FlexConnect AP looses its vlan, if fails to the WLAN interface.  What I have don is setup a script that the customer just runs and it issues the vlan mapping again.  I have also done this using WCS/NCS and or PI to push out the vlan mapping.  Now my customer did have an issue with the 1142's, but eventually we upgraded the code to the latest v7.3 that supported Windows 8 and that seemed to fix their issue.

Thanks,

Scott

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[jguandalini]

Maybe our solution is buy a newer AP model.

Thanks for your help, I'm keeping the research about the problem.

[Scott Fella]

Not really.... if you can fix the issue by a simple upgrade, than that would be a good fix.  Like I mentioned, I has WCS push our a template every night at 2am just for good measures and then gave my client a script that they would cut and paste into the WLC to make changes to the vlan mapping which only took a few seconds.  SO once they figured out that users were associating and were not getting an ip address, instead of figuring out what AP or how many had issues, they just pasted the commands to all AP's.

Thanks,

Scott

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[jguandalini]

Could you please share this script to I try put for my WLC?

Thanks

[Scott Fella]

Well, let me know what the WLAN ID are and the vlans and I will work on one today.

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[jguandalini]

Great, I really appreciate your help.

WLAN ID: 18

Native VLAN from Access Point port is: 101

Users (Mapped) VLAN is: 750

Dummy VLAN is: 999

Thank you so much

[Scott Fella]

I will work on it today. I'm heading into work so maybe later today.

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[sreejith_r]

HI;

          I am using 8.0.110.0 and its the same issue. Flex AP's loses its vlan mapping and its mapped to the native vlan itself.

it loses its actual vlan mapping and getting mapped with the native vlan.

[saleff]

We have the same problem with this version. We found the HA controller is failing to sync. If we turn the power off for the HA they don't lose the mapping. Not sure what the fix is yet, but it works without the HA.

[tsparks559]

Hi Scott,

I am having the same issue in my network. I have about 8000 AP's across 3 7500 controllers that are in the same mobility and same code version 7.5. We will be moving on to 8.0 soon but I need to understand why some AP's loose their flexconnect settings for no reason. This is causing a lot of issues as we solely rely on flexconnect across all sites.

[Scott Fella]

Sorry for the late response. The reason can be the code version or can be due to controllers not having the same configurations. If AP's move to a controller and the WLAN ID, AP Group, etc. is not defined on the controller it joined, it will default and use the default-group.  If all FlexConnect sites use the same WLAN ID and vlan mappings, you can do a work around that many do. On the WLC, create interfaces for the vlan, can be a bogus subnet, it's just so you can create a dynamic interface. Then once you have created your bogus interface, you can define he WLAN to use that interface.  The other work around would be to use Prime Infrastructure to push the WLAN/VLAN mapping to all the AP's each night or even create a CLI command script and push that out each night. 

Hope this helps

-Scott

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[Mark Withers]

We spent years on this with TAC engineers.

The best solution we got to was having WCS or Prime (which took over for WCS) push out a template every morning with the VLAN mapping. Some people have reported only needing it weekly, others needing it hourly.

Scott's solution looks like a good one to try.

As a note, like Scott said, this can be due to controllers not having the same configs. We couldn't find any discrepancy ourselves, but TAC found that the BSSID number wasn't the same on both WLCs. Note, the SSID number was the same, but the BSSID number was different. We surmised this was from before we had the WLCs managed by Prime, and had been configuring by hand... When you delete and re-add a subnet, you can choose the WLAN ID (which may or may not be the SSID number), but the BSSID number for the next created SSID simply increments internally. So, we had mismatches.

It's like some chucklehead assumed nobody makes mistakes. x.x