Will Ruckus access points still run without a zone director ?

[ian_gibble]

Hi, we have a zonedirector 1100 and 6 access points (eg 7363).

I'm trying to understand for resilience, and contingency plans in case any of our hardware fails. What would happen if the zonedirector failed ? Would it mean all the access points would continue to work, but not able to update or something. Or would the whole wireless network fail until it was fixed ?

[karl_lavender]

Providing your vlans are tagged out over the switchplant and you're not tunneling every SSID, if the Controller goes down for any reason, existing connected clients should remain stable and route, each AP will operate autonomously in this instance, however they will not accept new connections to the network, only allow existing connections to continue routing.

[ian_gibble]

Thanks Karl,

Just to clarify, does that mean wireless people who leave or switch off their laptops for the evening wouldn't work in the morning then ?

[karl_lavender]

I haven't tested that directly.  I imagine that as soon as the AP drops their association they would not be able to reconnect, so if you are supporting an environment with a lot of guest type connections, users connecting and dropping often, then you would want to get the ZD back online asap.

[it_registration]

Also to add to Karl's comment, there is a setting that tells the AP's to reboot after x minutes of no connectivity to the ZoneDirector, I believe default is 30 mins. This would then drop all associated clients until the ZoneDirector is back online. We run dual ZoneDirectors in Smart Redundancy config. to help aliviate these concerns.