Initial AP rollout on 5508 HA-SKU and N+1 redundancy

Question

Hi Board,
I have a 7.4 WLC pair - one as primary and one as secondary WLC. They are not doing AP-SSO.
I'm aware of all the design and configuration guides, but there are still some questions.
Primary WLC: 50 AP count / Secondary WLC: 500 AP count (due to HA-SKU).
Both WLCs are in one Mobility group.
A factory default AP will discover the WLCs (for example using DHCP 43). Even if the secondary WLC is not discovered in the hunting phase, the primary WLC will tell the AP about it's secondary buddy (mobility group).
The tie breaker is the WLC capacity - in this case all the APs will join the secondary WLC, because of the 500 AP count.
As soon as this happens, the 90 day "nagging" timer is started, right?
So here's the question:
- Will the 90 day timer stop if the APs are migrated to the primary WLC using primary, secondary per AP config?
- When will the 90 day timer be reseted?
How did you guys solve this issue?
One solution would be to place WLC1 and WLC2 in different mobility groups and only propagate WLC1 (primary) in the hunting phase.
In this case a brand new AP could not join the network if the primary WLC is unavailable...
Regards,
Johannes

Answer 1

Hi,
Here is the whole process:
One WLC has a valid AP Count license and the other WLC has a HA SKU UDI
    1. HA SKU is a new SKU with a Zero AP Count License.
   2.  The device with HA SKU becomes Standby the first time it pairs up.
   3.  AP-count license info will be pushed from Active to Standby.
   4.  On event of Active failure, HA SKU will let APs join with AP-count obtained and will start 90-day countdown. The granularity of this is in days.
    5. After 90-days, it starts nagging messages. It will not disconnect connected APs.
    6. With new WLC coming up, HA SKU at the time of paring will get the AP Count:
        If the new WLC has a higher AP count than the previous, the 90-day counter is reset.
        If the new WLC has a lower AP count than the previous, the 90-day counter is not reset.
       In order to lower AP count after switchover, the WLC offset timer will continue and nagging messages will be displayed after time expiry.
             Elapsed time and AP-count will be remembered on reboot.
            The factory default HA-SKU controller should not allow any APs to join.
Regards
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