Trouble clustering Aruba 315 IAPs in home lab

pareshrai13 — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 04:13:43 GMT

Hey all,

I’ve been working on a small home lab project with two Aruba 315 APs I picked up second-hand. They were originally in campus mode, but I converted them to Instant (IAP) mode so I could run them without a controller.

The goal is to have them cluster with a single virtual controller, but I keep running into issues. Instead of forming a cluster, each AP seems to operate as its own controller.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Tried two different firmware versions:

arubainstant_hercules_8.6.0.25
arubainstant_hercules_8.10.0.19

Both APs are on the same firmware version.
Both have been factory reset to clear old configs.
Same country code (GB) configured in the GUI and saved.
Both are in the same subnet.
“Allow new APs” setting is enabled.
I’ve set a Virtual Controller IP.
APs can ping each other when they’re alive.

Despite this, they still won’t join the same cluster — each one just comes up as its own virtual controller.

I also noticed that when I reboot the APs, they show the following message:

Checking country code. The country code is empty and set this AP to standalone mode

error in reading source file

disable auto topology rules

Starting up in standalone mode

This is after the country code has already been changed to GB in the GUI and saved.

Has anyone run into this before with second-hand Aruba IAPs? Any ideas what I might be missing?

Thanks in advance!

Query: Trouble clustering Aruba 315 IAPs in home lab

support_s — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 04:12:28 GMT

Hello,

Thank you for posting! HPE Networking forum has moved to Airheads Community. For HPE Aruba Networking product queries, request you to visit and post your query here.

You can refer to this link for more details.

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topic Trouble clustering Aruba 315 IAPs in home lab in Other HPE Product Questions

Trouble clustering Aruba 315 IAPs in home lab

Query: Trouble clustering Aruba 315 IAPs in home lab