Wireless Access

For the people on the forum managing networks with more than 1200 AP's which redundant controller design are you running?

N +1

Active Standby 1:1

Active : Active

What are your feelings of actual case use based on the VRD recommendations of Active Active 40% load, or N+1 or 1:1 80% load.

Currently in my network layout I have 1300+ AP's

38k Weekly unique users

3600 master with Standby 3600 master

N+1 with anywhere from 75%-90% AP load per local controller.

I seldom find my controllers to act in a sluggish manner. (5.0.3.3c) And debating if I want to rethink my network design

to a Active:Active Design and lower my levels to 40% per controller.

I have a second network running M3  Master,  M3 Local with 210 AP's and running Code 6.1.2.5 and I am not seeing the sluggish issues on this network. (But I have other ongoing problems in the 6 code).

Thanks for your thoughts.

Edwin,

We are currently at 6,000+ APs and 30+ controllers. We have adopted an N+1 redundancy model applied to each of our various controller clusters (i.e., master and local groupings). The master controller acts as the +1 and has a VRRP instance for each master|local pair. APs terminate their GRE traffic to the VRRP address, facilitating the redundant model.

It all depends on your organization's risk model. While wireless is certainly leveraged throughout our campus, we are not to the point where every AP needs to be fully redundant, nor do we need each master controller redundant. By following this approach and not following Aruba's active:active model, we are significantly reducing monetary costs.

In order to maintain scalability with existing hardware, we only license the controllers to 75% (i.e., 384 APs).

I welcome continued dialog on this if you desire.

Ryan,

 I appreciate your input on this matter.

 Do you ever find that depending on the usage of a certain controller that you need to lower the AP number percentage below 75% to keep the controller running smoothly based on the actual client usage of that controller?

Can you share which code version you are currently running?

I know it is more of a minority than a majority of users running very large Campus type wireless deployments so any input I can gather would be great.

is OSU also using Airwave for the monitoring of the APs and Controllers?

We are still growing and adding to our network with plans to add an additional 600-800 AP's this year and an additional controllers. So if I find reason for making changes to my network design this is the time for me to do it before I grow the network much larger and make it more complicated. 

We had about 143 Vrrp for the client side vlans, but by doing some clumping over the last holiday break I have gotten down to 63 Vrrp's which has seemed to improve some performace.

To complicate our network we also have non-aruba Arrays scattered throughout our network that also use the aruba for captive portal auth. (xirrus arrays)

Thanks

Edwin