Gracefully moving AP's between WLC

[johncaston_2]

I have a site with a large number of AP's and two WLC. I need to do some maintenance on the primary WLC so need to move all the AP's to the secondary controller and I'd like to do this gracefully, without impacting the site very much.

I've manually changed the order of the primary and secondary controller names on a number of AP's and it appears to move across reasonably seamlessly. I'd really like to apply a NCS template to move the rest across but need to be sure that it's not going to affect the users.

Does anyone know what the impact is when moving an AP between WLC in the same mobility group? Is there a better way to do this?

Cheers,

John   

[Leo Laohoo · Accepted solution]

You can schedule, using NCS, the move of the AP from the Primary to the Secondary controller.

In cases I don't want the clients to get impacted, I'd move them during the night.  It takes about 5 minutes to move ... provided the firmwares, mobility groups, SSID settings, radius, etc are the same across the primary and secondary controller.

[johncaston_2]

Because it's a base hospital, the wireless is always being used, although lesser at night.

I was hoping that there was a low impact way of doing this for future maintenance, as we will soon have patient heart monitors on the wireless network, so it becomes even more critical

What I think that I will do is move a small number of AP's across at a time, from different areas - if I create 3 or 4 templates and run them / schedule them at different times, then the impact should be quite minimal

Thanks for your reply, much appreciated

Cheers,

John

[Leo Laohoo]

If that is the case, then, yes.  You need to schedule the move in different batches.  For example, if you have, say, three APs in a particular area (like ICU) then you move them one at a time.

Makes it harder if there's only one AP in a particular area.

[johncaston_2]

Thanks Leo,

I got my hands on a couple of WLC and set them up in the lab. If you change the order of the Controllers, the AP automatically reboots and joins the new primary controller - in the lab it took just under 3 minutes but that was only 1x AP.

It does it pretty much straight away without giving you any warning - so I'll go with the templates and schedule it, as we discussed

Thanks for your help

Cheers,

John