replaced zone director 1205

Question

Hi,

We had a zone director 1205 go bad and become off line.

There was a fall over setup with Two zone directors & a total of 22 licenses.

When the zone Director went over to redundancy, everything is working ok.

however to get a repaired zone director will take weeks

so we went out and purchased an new one.

After full config when we enable smart redundancy the new unit says :

"New SR has lower licensed APs."

or

"Newly installed ZoneDirector has lower AP licenses resulting in lower Smart Redundancy (SR) licenses capacity. If you select 'OK', SR will be enabled but will operate with reduced SR licenses capacity. If you select 'Cancel', new ZoneDirector will not be enabled for SR."

how do we get this sorted out.....

david_black_594 · Answer

Great, sounds like you are in good shape then.  I agree with your concern about ZD1 having a latent issue.  With a little luck, the controller might be completely dead after doing the factory reset.  It might have no lights, even after trying multiple AC adapters.  In that happens to occur, they will send you a new controller.   If the failed controller had extra licenses, you'll get a license file for the new controller.

For future reference, the SmartZone platform avoids the license problem you mentioned.  Licenses belong to the organization and the admin can assign and revoke licenses to controllers at will.

itdept_head_me · Answer

Well..... fortunately i did not Join the 3rd unit to the pool...

just got the picture but did not click "ok"

i'm aware of the "temp license", but am keeping it for a last resort.

so i'm actually running the last ZD with the 22 licences.

but now the support agent is saying according to thier testing, the original system is not RMA it just needs a factory reset...

But i suspect that this will just re-flash the nand-flash storage and it will go bad again in a few more weeks once the SNMP & logs start being spooled again..

This whole setup with licensing is nonsense, you buy the licenses for the AP's

when you need to replace a controlelr you should be able to use a portal to deregister your old unit & re-allocate to the new replacement unit.

you CANNOT always use an RMA in a critical situation.

david_black_594 · Answer

It sounds like the failed controller, ZD1, had its 5 licenses + 12 extras that were added (total of 17).  When you joined ZD2 with it's 5 licenses in SmartRedundancy, then the licenses pooled and both controllers had 22 licenses (17+5).  Should either controller fail, the surviving controller will retain the 22 pooled licenses for 60 days.  After 60 days, the controllers revert to their individual license counts - 17 for ZD1 and 5 for ZD2.

It's too bad that you joined the ZD3 to ZD2 in SmartRedundancy - doing that reset the license pool and took you from a total of 22 down to 10 (5 on ZD2 + 5 on ZD3).  You should have left ZD2 alone and by itself until you received the replacement for ZD1.  Had you done that, ZD2 would have continued to work with 22 licenses for 60 days which is more than enough time to to receive the replacement from Ruckus.

I assume you bought ZD3 because you were worried that ZD2 might fail.  If so, you should have left the 3rd controller in the box and treated it as a spare to be used only if needed.  If ZD2 failed then you could unbox ZD3, add a temp license, and connect it to the network.

All you can do at this point is disable SmartRedundancy, remove ZD3 and put it back in the box and leave it there.  Once SmartRedundancy is disabled, you can then put a temp license on ZD2.  That will get all 22 APs back up and running for the life of the temp license (30 days).  Be sure to save a backup config in case it's needed.  In the unlikely case that ZD2 fails before you have the replacement for ZD1, unbox ZD3, add a temp license, give it the same static address as ZD2, connect it to the network, and reboot the APs.  Since ZD3 was previously joined to ZD2 in SmartRedundancy, it should already have the same config that ZD2 had.