A customer has very high availability requirements for wireless services.

Clustering is a feature that allows multiple Aruba MCs to work together as a single logical entity to provide high availability, scalability, and mobility for wireless clients12. One of the main benefits of clustering is that it provides wireless client load balancing and seamless failover for client sessions. This means that:

Wireless clients are distributed evenly among the cluster members based on the available resources and the configured load balancing algorithm12. This helps to optimize the network performance and avoid congestion or bottlenecks.

Wireless clients remain connected to the same MC, called the Active AP Anchor Controller (A-AAC), throughout their roaming area within the cluster, regardless of which AP they are associated with12. This ensures that the clients retain their IP address, subnet, and session information, and do not experience any disruption or delay in their connectivity or applications.

Wireless clients can seamlessly fail over to another MC, called the Standby AP Anchor Controller (S-AAC), in case of a failure or maintenance of their A-AAC12. The S-AAC takes over the client sessions and state information from the A-AAC without requiring any re-authentication or re-association from the clients. This minimizes the impact of the failure and provides high availability and resiliency for the wireless services.

Therefore, by explaining these benefits, the architect can demonstrate how clustering can meet the customer’s high availability requirements for wireless services.

References:

1: https://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_86_Web_Help/Content/arubaos-solutions/cluster/clus-over.htm

2: https://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/ArubaOS_85_Web_Help/Content/arubaos-solutions/cluster/clus-over.htm