User's Guide

Table Of Contents
hwc_fastfailover.fm
Availability and session availability
Availability
9034530-02,
March 2010
HiPath Wireless Controller, Access Points and Convergence Software V7.11, User Guide 381
7 Availability and session availability
This chapter describes the availability feature, including:
Availability
Session availability
Viewing the Wireless AP availability display
Viewing SLP activity
7.1 Availability
The HiPath Wireless Controller, Access Points and Convergence Software
system provides the ‘availability’ feature to maintain service availability in the
event of a HiPath Wireless Controller outage.
The availability feature links two HiPath Wireless Controllers — the primary
controller and the secondary controller (backup controller). The primary and the
secondary controllers share information about their Wireless APs. If the primary
controller fails, its Wireless APs failover to the secondary controller. The
secondary controller provides the wireless network and pre-assigned VNSs for
the Wireless APs.
Note: During the failover event, the maximum number of failover APs the
secondary controller can accommodate is equal to the maximum number of APs
supported by the hardware platform.
Wireless APs that attempt to connect to the secondary controller during a failover
event are assigned to the WLAN Service that is defined in the system’s default
AP configuration, provided the administrator has not assigned the failover
Wireless APs to one or more VNSs. If a system default AP configuration does not
exist for the controller (and the administrator has not assigned the failover
Wireless APs to any WLAN Service), the APs will not be assigned to any WLAN
Service during the failover.
A HiPath Wireless Controller will not accept a connection by a foreign AP if the
HiPath Wireless Controller believes its availability partner controller is in service.
Also, the default Wireless AP configuration assignment is only applicable to new
APs that failover to the backup controller. Any Wireless AP that has previously
failed over and is already known to the backup system will receive the
configuration already present on that system. For more information, see Section
4.5.3, “Configuring the default Wireless AP settings”, on page 181.