Wireless Access

Hello all -

 

Not sure this is even an option - let me start with some history:

 

We have a main office, that due to some unfortunate circumstances was left with out power to the datacenter for approximately 12 hours. We have one Aruba 3400 controller at this location which supports 15 other locations with wireless access - so the question here is can I put another Aruba 3400 controller at one of my other offices which is connected with a MPLS circuit and have it take over if the main office's internet (or power)?

 

This means that the other controller would have to route out a different IP address and that the remote AP's could actually talk to that - might mean having multiple IPS associated with 1 dns name - right now I don't actually publish a dns entry - just go straight to an IP address.

 

Please let me know if you need more information.

 

Thank you!

 

Lirria

#3400

I don't think you can run these two as a VRRP pair; however, have you thought about using the Backup LMS field under AP system profile? This will give you the ability to attach the AP's to a layer 3 address in one central location and in the even of a failure allow you to have a backup. If the users are authenticated to the system via that controller, they will unfortunately have to re-authenticate. If you are authenticating on an anchor controller in a DMZ however and that device is still up, you may be able to get around this.

We do just that for our setup. We have an east coast and west coast set of controllers and using primary lms and backup lms, point sites to the controllers accordingly.

 

Sites east of the mississippi point to the east coast controller as the primary and the west coast as the backup lms controller. Opposite for the west coast of course.  This way if our controllers (or more often our circuits) have issues, the AP's at the remote sites failover to the other controllers.

 

Works pretty well though you will have a couple minute outage during the failover.

 

Hope that helps,

 

Ian

Awesome! I'll have to take a look at that option more in depth, do the configurations sync or do you have to make updates to both? We are currently using the internal database for a small group of systems.

Lirria