New 8540 WLC Setup

[mathemba]

Good Day Cisco Comminuty,

I have a new 8540 WLC, that is joining an old 2504 WLC. The plan is to remove the old and have the new one running alone. Now I would like my AP's to distribute ip addresses from a special pool that I setup on my Windows DHCP Server. I also want to setup a new VLAN for the AP's, but I do not have Cisco ISE and I use a Windows Network Policy Server as my radius.

So I have a special VLAN for AP's that I will configure on the switches, but I want to know what do I configure the AP's to distribute ip's to wireless devices from another VLAN.

[Mark Elsen]

 - In fact the DHCP handling relates more to the controller (WAN) configuration(s) then the APs ; review this documentation :
              https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/8-10/config-guide/b_cg810/dhcp.html

 M.

[Scott Fella]

What do you mean that you have a new 8540 that is joining a 2504?  If you bring up the 8540 in parallel with the existing 2540, you first need to make sure that the code you are running or will run on the 8540 supports your existing ap's like what @Mark Elsen mentioned.  You would then configure the access point HA to have the following:

Primary controller: 2504
Secondary controller: 8540

Test with one ap to make sure the ap joins the 8540 by reversing what I have above.  This way you know that the ap successfully joins.

When you are ready, you can reverse the HA so that the ap's start joining the 8504.  It doesn't matter what vlan you have the ap's on as long as the ap's has connectivity to the controller to join.  The HA will have the controller hostname which is case sensitive and the ip, so this will be stored in nvram on the ap and the ap will know of the controller(s).  So moving ap's to. different vlan is fine as long as there is reachability.

[Rich R]

Scott has already covered the AP management part but client DHCP is really about your WLAN configuration.

If the WLAN is centrally switched then it depends on the assigned VLAN on the WLC and the DHCP server config on the WLC for DHCP relay.
If the WLAN is flexconnect locally switched then DHCP is handled on the VLAN the AP is putting the WLAN traffic into - eg next hop router or switch.

The AP is never involved in handing out IP addresses to clients - all it does is bridge traffic between the local VLAN and the client (flex local switching) or between the WLC and the client over CAPWAP tunnel (central switching).