WLC AP Failover Priority

[Ven Taylor]

We use WCS to migrate AP's to "backup" controllers prior to making changes to our primary wireless controllers.

However, this process is long and arduous when your AP's number in the hundreds, a 5-minute failover per AP can take hours.

Changing the failover priority to "critical" would definitely speed up the process, but at what cost?

Leaving them at "low" makes for a graceful migration.  Supplicants roam to another AP and are none the wiser.

Besides the speed in which the AP's fail over to a secondary controller, what other differences are there between the AP failover priorities?

Do the AP's, when set to "critical" no longer send disassociation frames to the clients?

I've looked at design guides and FAQ's, but nothing says what happens, just that you can change the priorities.

Thanks!

Ven

Running 7.0 code on 6k-WISM

Multiple AP types.

[Kayle Miller]

Ven,

     My understanding with the failover priority was that it was meant to classify the ap's into groups of importance in the event you lost a controller and had insufficent capacity to allow all the ap's onto the other controllers, those with the critical priority would be allowed to join a full controller and a lower priority ap would be dropped. I am not sure why that would make the failover happen quicker.

HTH