For the R610, turn on secondary port at 802.3af?

[david_buhl]

We have 100+ R610s that replaced R500s and R600s.  The R610s require 802.3at for full funcationality.  I have POE+ switches that have been powering all the Ruckus APs for a few years, and the APs have always worked at full functionality.  

With the reduced functionality, the secondary ethernet port is disabled.  Why?  I'm not sure, as it really doesn't require much/any power, and the APs on 802.3at actually use the same amount of power, once they are running.  But replacing all of my switches with ones that can provide 1500 watts of power seems very difficult/expensive.  A 48 port HP/Arruba POE+ switch only provide 382 Watts.

So, I'm wondering if anyone has found a way to turn on the secondary port while still getting 802.3af power.  I've looked without luck.

Thanks

[diego_garcia_de]

yes, got the secondary port working fine and the radios at full power.  I would force the AP to  AT power mode and limit the budget on the switch to 18W and it was working fine. If the AP is forced to AT mode then all functionality will work regardless of what the switch is thinking...  The switch-side limit is to better share the POE budget among all ports. In fact, I even got the AP working in AT mode when connected to a legacy AF-only switch.

[john_d]

My experience is like Diego’s. For devices where they are right on the border between af/at or at/at+ you generally can force them into the higher power mode without much ill effect. I have done this with forcing R720 and R730 into “at+” on at switches where the max per port power is 33W (vs the max 35W spec from ruckus) and never seen an overcurrent cutoff even under heavy load.

The R610 is barely outside the .af power envelope and I expect most of the time it is sitting closer to the idle numbers.

[david_buhl]

Thanks Diego, that seems to be working.  I updated all of the APs to be 802.3at and rebooted a couple of them, while leaving the switch settings at about 17W.  The two I rebooted did activate the secondary port and don't seem to be marked as using extra power on the switch.

After hours I'll power-cycle my most loaded switch.  It's has 24 POE+ ports, and has 20 R610s attached.  If that one comes up normally, then that's definitely the solution.

I guess when I changed the APs to 802.3at previously, I had already messed with the POE settings on those ports that caused them not to be properly powered, or over-powered, depending on the test I was running.

Do you have LLDP turned on on those switch ports?

Thanks!

Dave

[john_d]

I kept LLDP on but saw that when POE mode is forced to a mode, I didn’t see any Ruckus products trying to do lldp power negotiations.

[diego_garcia_de]

I had LLDP on and saw ruckus advertising its consumption in some cases, but in this case where my switch was not negotiating poe over LLDP I don't recall if the LLDP POE PDUs are sent when forcing the mode.

Hope this solves the issue for you. Personally, I don't like switches reserving the full capacity... I prefer them cutting power on demand (most of them will allow you to configure priorities for POE) but maybe that's just me.

In my case, the peak of power consumption I've seen was not during power up but under very heavy ussage (hundreds of clients on an AP passing maybe 150-200 mbps and having application visibility on).

Other than that, I've never seen the devices come close to the max power budget.

Hope your test works out fine!

(and maybe take a look at the power priorities in your switch so that you either stagger the bringup of the ports over time or if the switch decides its overpowered then it shuts down your least important APs)

Cheers!