WLC Redundancy - Regional / Centralised model

[Lam Hung Chung]

Hi all,

Our organisation has multiple controllers at regional sites (one per region) & want to implement redundancy by placing one controller at headquarter's datacentre as a backup in case the site's failed.

All our controllers are 5508 with 7.0.116.0 loaded

I did a search around and found multiple documentations of how to do it but all related to creating a mobility group

Is it possbile to implement this scenario without creating mobility group ? (As in Cisco docs for software release 7.0 June 2010 - quoted

"Centralized and regional controllers do not need to be in the same mobility group" )

I did try around but couldn't make it work ? Have anyone experience with this setup & give me some hints please?

Thank you,

[Justin Kurynny]

Lam Hung Chung,

You can configure an access point to have a preference, in order, for up to 3 controllers. When the AP boots it will use these configured preferences to find a controller.

If you configure the AP's preferred Primary Controller as the local (regional) controller and the preferred Secondary Controller as the headquarters then when the regional controller is not available the AP will try to register to the headquarters controller.

You can configure this on an AP-by-AP basis, but this can be cumbersome and slow. If you have WCS or NCS, then you can use AP Templates to apply these changes on a site-by-site basis (by selecting multiple APs at a time), which will save you a lot of time.

Here is a screenshot for doing this manually on each AP:

• Choose the Wireless tab on the top menu bar
• Choose All APs under Access Points in the left nav window
• Select the AP to be modified
• Choose the High Availability tab
• Enter your Primary and Secondary controller Names and Management IP Addresses

Justin