WLC licensing

[Maurice Ball]

I need some clarification on a WLC licensing. We have two WLC. WLC-S and WLC- L, they both have 250 access points connected to them, but WLC-S has licenses for 500 access points, while WCL- L only has licenses for 250 access points. Both WLC’s should provide backup for the other WLC in case of hardware failure.
 
To me, this seem like a clear case, we just need to buy a 250 license upgrade for WLC-L, so that both WLC’s can support 500 AP’s,
enough to cover all access points for both locations.
 
But I’m being challenged by the business on this, they are saying that even if one of the WLC’s fail, and the users are transferred to the
other WLC, we do not need more licenses thus we already have 750 which is enough to cover both sites.
 
My question is do I currently have enough licenses or should I have 500 licenses on each of the controller for failover?

Note: The WLCs is setup in a mobility group not a HA cluster.

[Leo Laohoo]

Users????

Are you talking about 250/500 APs or wireless clients?

[Maurice Ball]

250 Access points

[Freerk Terpstra · Accepted solution]

In the current configuration you need to buy 250 additional AP licenses for the WLC-L controller if you don't want to loose a single AP when there is a failure with WLC-S. There is not something like license clustering as with the Cisco ASA firewalls (since software 8.3 and higher).

There are also a few other options:

1. Upgrade your controllers and configure SSO HA with WLC-S as primary WLC.
2. Work with AP priorities so that the most important AP's are on-line when WLC-S fails.
3. Activate the evaluation license (500 AP's) on WLC-S when WLC-S fails, so you have 60 days to replace WLC-S.

Options 2 and 3 do have major drawbacks when it comes to stability of your infrastructure. My preferred way is option 1 or just buy 250 more AP licenses.

[Maurice Ball]

Great information, thanks.