Wireless Access

I am upgrading about 30 controllers and am wondering where the APs pull their firmware upgrades from. My setup is redundant masters using VRRP and 28 local controllers at remote sites. I am planning to upgrade all controllers from 6.4.3.4 to 6.4.3.10. I am planning to ftp the new image to the non-boot partition and reboot all 30 controllers at the same time. The APs are a mix of 105/205. My concern is this - will the APs discover the master using DNS and attempt to upgrade their firmware from the master? Or will they ugprade from their local controller as it is on the same new version? We have several thousand APs and I'm trying to determine an outage window (which needs to be kept to a minimum due to the type of services we offer over the wireless network). Thanks for any advice!

Hi!

That depends on how you got your master discovery set up. If all the APs discover the master controller via DNS/DHCP options first you´ll probably get a bottle neck in how many APs can be upgraded at a time depending on bandwidth, controller model, if you have RAPs etc, it might delay the process.

You could check out "AP Image Preload" if you have controllers that supports it. That way you can pre-populate your APs with the new firmware image to minimize the maintenance window. Look it up in the User Guide.

Cheers,

We have 3600 and 7200 series, so AP Image Preload is an option. However I have read varying reports on how well it works on the 105s. I could try to only preload the 205s which would be the bulk of the access points.