We are currently considering expanding our existing wireless environment to cover additional dorms. By doing so, we will exceed the capacity of our current controller, and can either add an additional controller card or for a slight incremental cost, add another controller. We planned to add the additional controller, with the idea that the controller would allow redundancy/failover/clustering to happen, so that if one controller were to go down, for instance, the other would take over.
We were subsequently told that this was a faulty understanding of the failover function. So we thought we might be able to try another approach: every other WAP would be controlled by alternating controllers. That way, if controller A, with waps 1,3,5,7,9... on it were to go down, the coverage in any given building would be halved, because controller B, with waps 2,4,6,8 ... would continue to run. Nope, that is a bad idea, says the contact: each controller will maintain its own heat map and routing info, etc. and as a result, there would be nowhere to look for a unified picture of the wireless network. So I'm confused: what is the exact nature of controller clustering or failover under Aruba? Given somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 APs, how should one configure the controllers John ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
