Backup Controllers
A single controller at a centralized location can act as a backup for access points when they lose connectivity with the primary controller in the local region. Centralized and regional controllers do not need to be in the same mobility group. You can specify a primary, secondary, and tertiary controller for specific access points in your network. Using the controller GUI or CLI, you can specify the IP addresses of the backup controllers, which allows the access points to fail over to controllers outside of the mobility group.
The following are some guidelines for configuring backup controllers:
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You can configure primary and secondary backup controllers (which are used if primary, secondary, or tertiary controllers are not specified or are not responsive) for all access points connected to the controller as well as various timers, including heartbeat timers and discovery request timers. To reduce the controller failure detection time, you can configure the fast heartbeat interval (between the controller and the access point) with a smaller timeout value. When the fast heartbeat timer expires (at every heartbeat interval), the access point determines if any data packets have been received from the controller within the last interval. If no packets have been received, the access point sends a fast echo request to the controller.
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The access point maintains a list of backup controllers and periodically sends primary discovery requests to each entry on the list. When the access point receives a new discovery response from a controller, the backup controller list is updated. Any controller that fails to respond to two consecutive primary discovery requests is removed from the list. If the access point’s local controller fails, it chooses an available controller from the backup controller list in this order: primary, secondary, tertiary, primary backup, and secondary backup. The access point waits for a discovery response from the first available controller in the backup list and joins the controller if it receives a response within the time configured for the primary discovery request timer. If the time limit is reached, the access point assumes that the controller cannot be joined and waits for a discovery response from the next available controller in the list.
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When an access point's primary controller comes back online, the access point disassociates from the backup controller and reconnects to its primary controller. The access point falls back only to its primary controller and not to any available secondary controller for which it is configured. For example, if an access point is configured with primary, secondary, and tertiary controllers, it fails over to the tertiary controller when the primary and secondary controllers become unresponsive. If the secondary controller comes back online while the primary controller is down, the access point does not fall back to the secondary controller and stays connected to the tertiary controller. The access point waits until the primary controller comes back online to fall back from the tertiary controller to the primary controller. If the tertiary controller fails and the primary controller is still down, the access point then falls back to the available secondary controller.
This section contains the following subsections: