Throughput on WLC 5508

[aleopoldie]

Hi,

I have a doubt about the understanding of the uplink throughput of WLCs.

What's the goal to have for example 8 Gbps throughput on the 5508 (so, 8 ports used) if the AP's (2702 for example) can only reach 1 Gbps ?

Thank you,

[patoberli]

Let's assume you have more than 1 AP in your company, say 5 2702. 🙂

In this case you could theoretically reach 5x ~1 Gbps from the APs, so you need more than 1 Gbps on the WLC. I reality though, with a mixed client environment (in my case University) and ~130 APs and ~1500 clients online, I barely ever reach 1 Gbps of real world usage. I guess this will change in the years to come, but so far it's surprising how little traffic is used.

Also, if you use 2 or more ports, you can (if you have the switches for it) build an LAG etherchannel and have redundancy. So if you reboot one of the two switches (software update, ....), your WLC will continue to work without any outage.

[biaacer2]

You can use all 8 ports to distribute client traffic evenly across all of your access points. 

For this, you have to enable LAG on your 5508 WLC, this will give you 8Gbps of uplink instead of 1. 

We recommend using src-dst-ip load balancing mechanism, with this, your APs will be distributed across all ports. 

Switch config:

SW(config)#port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip

If you have only one AP, then yes, there is no point in enabling LAG.