AP's will not join new 5508's

[e-kalbach]

We just completed deployment of (4) 5508-250's in a large enviroment. We are now trying to get some test AP's to join the new WLC's. At one point it appeared that one of the 5 joined but the other 4 did not. We rebboted everything including resetting the AP's to factory and upon doing that all 5 ap's came up and joined the legacy WISM's blades sitting in the core.

The new 5508's are sitting on a new stack of switches running 12.2.58(SE2) ip base.  We have all new subnets for the new ap's as well as all vlan interfaces on the controllers themselves. IE: vlan 499 and vlan 500. Vlan 500 is Management and 499 is the ap-manager interfaces (32 of them).

1. Why would the new AP's prefer the old WISM to the 5508's?

2. What do we need to do to fix that until the we can do a migration?

3. The WLC's and the cores are not in the same stack. The WLC's are on the customers 6509 and the (4) 5508's are on a new 3750x stack with a port channel to the core 6509.

4. Does the new stack have to be running the L-3 IOS with a routing protocol running. The customers current enviroment is EIGRP.

5. I have looked at the new WLC configuration and compared it to other similar sites and they are the same with the exception of the L3 on the new 3750x stack.

Thanks,

Evan Kalbach

[Leo Laohoo]

1. Why would the new AP's prefer the old WISM to the 5508's?

Depends on the model of your AP and the firmware of your controllers.

[Scott Fella]

The old WLC had an ap manager. The newer WLC use the management as the ap manager. You need to have routing enabled between the old ap manager vlan and the management vlan. You also have to check if you have option 43 or DNS enabled to point the AP's to the old WiSM's. There also should be mobility setup between the old WLC's and the new WLC's. Make sure that you also set the high availability in each if the AP's to tell them what primary, secondary or tertiary WLC they should use. AP fallback also needs to be enabled on all WLC's.

AP's must also be supported on the WLC code version you are using like Leo mentioned. Here is the matrix for that. You can see which AP models are supported on the new WLC depending on the code your running on them.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/controller/5500/tech_notes/Wireless_Software_Compatibility_Matrix.html

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[e-kalbach]

In the end the WISM's will go away and be totally replaced with the 5508's. We want to test that the new 5508's are working correctly by letting some of the new AP's join them.  Also in the end all of the current ap's on the wism's will be uninstalled. The AP's are supported with th code we are running as over 500 sites are up and operational.

The old and new managers and ap-managers are in totally different ip ranges from each other which is what we want for our testing.  The vlan interfaces are created currently on the 6509 core core and not on the new stack though the new stack knows of them via vtp of course.

[Scott Fella]

You understand how these AP's join the WLC?  You either setup mobility or you have to configure the high availability on each AP.

Thanks,

Scott

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[Rasika Nayanajith]

Here is my response to your queries.

1.  Unless you configure primary,secondary (HA parameters) on your AP, it does not prefer 5508 as long as it can reach both controllers

2. You can configure the 5508 as primary controller ( & WiSM as secondary) to inluence AP to go to 5508 as first preference. You can try below CLI command on your WiSM for the APs you want to register to 5508 as primary & keep WiSM as secondary.

config ap secondary-base

config ap primary-base <5508 WLC name> <5508 Mgt IP>

3. WLC does not need to connect Core

4. As long as WLC have rachability to rest of networks, that's fine. No L3 routing required on the swich you connect the WLC.L3 gateway can be defined another L3 switch. Then you should have extend L2 from the WLC connect switch upto L3 defined switch.

5. Doesn't matter this.

HTH

Rasika

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