Monitoring, Management & Location Tracking

Question- Statistics and recommendations for upgrading a large deployment of Instant Access Points using Airwave

Environment- Instant Access Point upgrade using Airwave server. The results were tested in Airwave server running 8.0.6

Answer- If you are planning to upgrade more than 100 devices with Airwave, it is strongly recommended that you do so using the feature that separates downloading of the image from rebooting of the device.

The approximate estimates are :

Download of image: it takes about 4.4 hours per 1000 devices. 
Reboot of devices: 10-20 minutes per 1000 devices.  

Separating the upgrades into these 2 tasks can limit downtime to a very small window for a large number of devices.

Please note that when an instant cluster is upgraded, each AP fetches its own image from Airwave and hence the calculations are per device and not per Virtual Controller (VC). Also, maximum interleaved jobs is set to 1 and the bandwidth between the Airwave server and Instant Access Point devices should not be a constraint.