Load Balanced APs - only one AP serving clients - is this normal ??

[dtopo]

Have been using load balanced radio profiles for our large spaces here on campus for years now. Noticing as of late that only a single AP is serving clients while the others sit (mostly) idol....perhaps a few clients from time to time. Is this the expected behavior ? I remember our load balanced APs would all have some fairly equal number clients in the past.

The APs in question are a mix of AP230 and AP250s - firmware 10.0.10 

The other part of this post - is the setting for the status light behavior on the same APs. I can not find it! Way back, I know the behavior was changed to a slow blinking white light from a solid white light to preserve the LEDs - just curious if can make the behavior the same across our 230s and 50s. Seems the 50s are always solid white....   not critical by any means, but it often confuses our users ! 

Thanks all for any insight - I appreciate this forum - it's a great resource ! 

Dennis

[MikeC · Accepted solution]

Hi Dennis,

 To answer your first question, load balancing is a setting generally reserved for situations where we have to have multiple APs covering the same wireless space due to a high number of client connections. Think along the lines of an auditorium that can hold over 300 people. This allows both(or all three, depending on client demands) devices to share the load in that same space so neither becomes overwhelmed. 

 When using load balancing in a traditional deployment where we have one AP per room(or less) this has the unintended consequence of moving clients to an inappropriate AP, such as one that is physically distant or in your case where one AP takes on the lion's share. 

 I would recommend disabling the client load balancing to see if this results in more normal client load. Here is a knowledgebase article with a bit more detail on where these settings are located in Radio Profiles:

https://extremeportal.force.com/ExtrArticleDetail?an=000079293 

 To answer your other question, this has been moved to the "Management Options" section of network policy. You can locate this by browsing to your selected network policy, clicking the "Additional Settings" tab at the top and then finding "Management Options" on the left side. If you have not enabled customization of these settings this page will be blank until you click the "off" button to the "on" position. Here is a knowledgebase article that may help find the LED settings:

https://extremeportal.force.com/ExtrArticleDetail?an=000078565

 Let us know if there is anything else we can do to help.

-Mike Coughlin

[dtopo]

Thanks Mike! Appreciate your quick response.  Yeah...these are such spaces - large rooms with line of site ap to ap. Perhaps I'm not getting enough clients to distribute to the other APs. (??) No biggie- I will monitor and see what happens when we have larger numbers of connecting clients. 

And thanks for the location on that other setting - so much of IQ I  haven't explored yet.

Dennis