If you have HA pairs of Cisco 8510s why would you not rely on the failover unit to be the backup? Were you going to buy two HA pairs for each campus?
We have been using Cisco 8510 HA pairs for a few months now with goo success. Our failover unit is at our on campus backup data center (we also have DR type of stuff at a facility in Atlanta). All of our buildings have dual feeds to both our main DC as well as the backup DC. When an 8510 fails over to the HA unit, the clients are rarely affected at all since the HA unit keeps full state info. All along the units seem to fail over for some reason with the roles of the two units reversed. The clients do not know the difference, nor do the APs. We have to look closely to tell which is active since they share a common IP address for AP (and therefore, also client) connectivity. We do not list a secondary or tertiary controller for any of our APs. As for mobility groups, since our campus is divided into three MPLS areas each with a single 8510 (and it's HA unit), we have different mobility group in each area. These are relatively separated by outdoor space, though users can be outside in a place that is covered by leakage from buildings in two areas (and hence two mobility domains). We have not had any complaints though. We do physically house all of our 8510 primary WLCs in the main DC and all of the HA units in the backup DC. Having as lot of fiber makes this quite doable. I'm sure that others who have been running these longer that we have will have some opinions as well. By the way, even though each 8510 has a listed capacity of 6,000 APs, we are trying to limit ours to 3,000 for now. Two of my MPLS areas are comfortably below 3,000 but one is close. We will be ordering another 8510 HA pair for this area. They will both be placed in the same mobility group. If you want more info, please feel free to call. John Watters Network Engineer, Office of Information technology The University of Alabama<https://www.ua.edu> A115 Gordon Palmer Hall Box 870346 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 Phone 205-348-3992<tel:205-348-3992> [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [The University of Alabama]<https://www.ua.edu/> From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Wandell Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2016 12:12 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Mobility We are in the process of setting up new wireless controllers at Binghamton University. We will be setting up 2 sets of 8540 ha paired controllers on our main campus and 1 set of 5520 ha paired controllers on a satellite campus. This will be the first time we have housed controllers at the satellite campus. Currently we have 3 sets of Wism2 controllers on campus and let access points associate to any of our controllers. All current controllers are in the same mobility group. What we would like to do to is break up ap's by building, with each ap in a building having a defined primary and secondary controller. My question is would we still need the mobility group for our controllers? Any problems concerns you see by doing this? Thanks in advance for any input Chris ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
