WLC Failover Question

[Roger Alderman]

Hi All

Can anyone give me a definitive answer to this question please?

If you are using a pair of wireless LAN controllers configured with primary and secondary controllers for the access points and the primary controller fails - do the access points reboot before associating to the secondary controller. I can't see why they would need to but documentation suggests they do.

Additionally, has anyone significantly reduced the failover time? If so, what is the lowest practical failover time. I know the actual failover time can be reduced to 3 seconds but I think that is likely to cause other problems.

Thanks guys.

Regards

Roger

[Raul Manzano Barroso]

As far I know, In this case the AP does not reboot, only changes its lwapp status to discovery and begins with the discovery proccess.

You can see in the AP if it is restarted; when it places registered in the second WLC, Wireless tab and select the AP affected; normaly in the first tab you can see bottom right the AP up time and the AP association time; if this AP has rebooted this value will close to 00:00.

Normaly I set the Ap heartbeat timeout to 5 seconds, I don´t know if is the best value and my failover time is bigger than your, I don´t know how critical are your network, but a prefer a higher heartbeat timeout to avoid unnecessary AP changes that spend more time.

Best Regards.

[Roger Alderman]

Hi Raul

I can confirm that the AP does not reboot. I could not see any reason why it would.

Your heartbeat time would mean a total failover time of 15 secs which seems reasonable. I know you can reduce the heartbeat to 1 sec which would give a failover time of 3 secs but I think this would risk a lot of failovers occurring.

Regards

Roger