Two anchors WLC for one SSID

Peter Boerjesson · ‎06-10-2014

RIght now I'm only in a lab situation and here's what I got.

All WLCs are 5508 running 7.4.121.0

WLC1 has SSID GuestTest

This SSID is anchored to two different WLCs (WLC2 and WLC3)

From what I can see clients connected to GuestTest are loadbalance on WLC2 and WLC3 (so far so good).

If I shutdown the switchports connected to WLC2 I was hoping they'd move over to WLC3 but this isn't happening. In fact even if I bring back WLC2 by doing no-shut it takes a long time before I get any connection again (I know the mobility tunnel takes a long time to be built), but it's like even that doesn't help. I actually have to disconnect from the SSID and reconnect in order to get connectivity again. I don't think this is a client issue since I tried it with virus 8.1 (sorry I mean windows 8.1), ihpone (ios7) and samsung (andriod 4.3) all give me the same problem (except that iphone gives me even more grief at connecting at all). In the lab setup I'm authenticating with WPA2 PSK (nothing special there) and the DHCP server is some local linux box at the anchoring WLC.

So with all that said, is there anyway to have actuall working redundancy in a scenario like this? It seems all I'm getting in this setup is "load-balancing" on the clients, which I'm not even sure I want.

Peter Boerjesson · ‎06-10-2014

I've kind figured this one out. The clients actually do failover as soon as the mobility tunnel to the failing WLC goes down. The only problem with this is that it took 11minutes for the WLC to realize that the mobilty tunnel was down.

I guess I should have waited a bit longer, but 11 minutes... Anyway, do anyone know if you can fiddle around with some timers so the WLC can realize the mobility tunnel is down (and if possible how many other problems might I create)?