WLC 5508 and mobility groups

[milou_sweden]

Hi,

We are using 2 WLC 5508 running 7.0.98.0 sw (AP's are 1142) at our primary site. They are hosting 3 different WLAN/SSID's, one for guest and the

other 2 are for corporate access. We have put the WLC's in a mobility group, say "AAAA".

Now we have the need for our UK peer site to publish a corp WLAN that exists in UK - at our site, and when trying to configure for that (following the c70cg.pdf) - I put the WLC's for UK in a new mobility group, say "BBBB". But i can't add our WLC's into that mobilty group

(i get a duplicate mac address message).

What's the correct way of configuring this, does all WLCs need to be in the same mobility group?

Is there some reason why we can't have 2 mobility groups? Is there any upside/downside to configuring 2 mob. groups?

Any clearification would be greatly appreciated

BR

//Mikael

[Serge Yasmine]

Hi Mikael, you do not need to add the WLC to the same mobility group as long as you are not doing inter-controller mobility or guest tunneling.

For your case you can have the following lise under the mobility group configuration section:

WLC1 mgt ip address - mgt mac address - mobility group A

WLC2 mgt ip address - mgt mac address - mobility group A

WLC3 mgt ip address - mgt mac address - mobility group B

Cheers,

Serge

[milou_sweden]

Thanks Serge for your speedy reply,

Our site in UK has got 2 WLC's as well, and they want to "publish" their corp WLAN at our site,

so in that case are we not doing inter-controller mobility? .. they are using our controllers and

that traffic is tunneled back to their controllers. Or did i missunderstand inter-controller mobility?

BR

//Mikael

[Serge Yasmine]

You are welcome. inter-controller mobility means you have wlc1 serving site A and wlc2 serving site B. you got a client and you want to ensure continuity of services for that client when he/she moves from site A to site B. since you are speaking about different countries here: i do not think you are doing inter controller mobility.

going back to your question:

Now we have the need for our UK peer site to publish a corp WLAN that  exists in UK - at our site

/////

you mean that there is an SSID configured on the WLC in the UK site that will have access points in your site, right? in that case you just do the configuration as i told you with regards to mobility groups and then move the access points from your local wlc to the uk wlc by changing primary/secondary WLC on the AP. you need to ensure ip connectivity is present between AP and UK WLC. An AP can advertise the SSIDs of one WLC at a time. If you do that, it means that your local AP are not longer going to speak with your local WLC via lwapp/capwap and are not longer going to advertise your local SSID... not sure if this is really what you want to do?

If i didn't get your question right, let me know and maybe re-emphasize. since i got lost with the mobility groups thing :-)

[milou_sweden]

Thanks for you input!

the UK site does have their own two 5508 WLC's with connected AP's.

We are not considering a "hostile" takover of their APs (at this moment :->), but their Excecutives

are travelling to us in Sweden quite frequently these day, and they want to connect to their "home" corp network when they are over here.

Now the reason for me to want to have a mob group for inter-controller mobility locally, is just that we have the

two 5508's with a bunch of AP's - some connected WLC1 and others connected to WLC2.

So roaming beween the WLC's is desirable. At our site there is just one site (though it's quite big).

Regarding the SSID configured on the WLC in the UK - i have replicated that SSID over here, put it their Radius servers

and tried putting their WLC's in a different mobility group than ours. Then i tried adding our WLC's to that group as well.

Doesn't work, since they are already in our local mob group..

Am i missunderstanding the use of mob groups?

BR

//Mikael

[Serge Yasmine]

I think you are misunderstanding , so far what you did on your local swedish site is correct. Your two swedish WLCs have to be in their own same mobility group so you can give seamless roaming to your wireless users across your swedish area without interruption.

On a WLC mobility group config page, you can have only one entry  per WLC, this is why you are getting the duplicate error message.

WEBGUI - CONTROLLER - MOBILITY MANAGEMENT - MOBILITY GROUPS

If you want to put your 4 WLCs so they exchange mobility messages, the following has to happen on all 4 WLCs.

xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx  192.168.1.1  uk

yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy 192.168.1.2 uk

zz:zz:zz:zz:zz:zz  172.17.1.1  sweden

aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa  172.17.1.2  sweden

Note when you add WLC on the mobility section, the WLC start sending messages to each like, hey i have this client and you have that client and so on. But this has nothing to do with what you are trying to achieve.

With regards to the execs that are coming, yes, replicate the SSID and point it to the Radius Server they have in UK, add your swedish WLC(s) as a NAS on the Radius Server and it should work as if they were in UK. that should be enough and i advise you to do the following for mobility groups config.

on the two UK WLCs

xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx  192.168.1.1  uk

yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy 192.168.1.2 uk

on the two Swedish WLCs

zz:zz:zz:zz:zz:zz  172.17.1.1  sweden

aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa  172.17.1.2  sweden

hope i cleared it out for you. greeting from cold Belgium tonight :-) and hope the execs will enjoy Sweden!