Question Regarding NX5500 Firmware Upgrade

[dleboeuf]

Hello,

We have a customer who is wanting us to upgrade their NX5500 to the new WiNG 7 version due to deploying some newer APs soon. I have a couple of questions regarding this upgrade.

1. They want to know if we can upgrade the controller with out having any outage so we can do it during business hours. From my understanding, we can “upgrade” the controller, but the firmware won’t actually upgrade/load until a reboot, is this correct?
2. To follow up on this, they want to know if they can slowly roll out the updates to the APs. Is this not really possible because once the controller is updated to WiNG 7, then WiNG 5 APs won’t be able to talk with the controller, or will they still function, just have a version mismatch error and not be able to push out config?
3. Are we better off just scheduling a maintenance window to upgrade the controller and APs at once?

Thank you! 

[Christoph_S]

Here’s a link with upgrade instructions which may be helpful in your situation:

https://extremeportal.force.com/ExtrArticleDetail?an=000081743

Thank you,

[Ovais_Qayyum · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Here are the answers to your questions:

1- Your understanding is correct, the new firmware will only load after a controller reload/reboot. If it's a centralized/NOC type of deployment where controller is only used for mgmt., traffic is locally bridged, no tunneled data, no Captive Portal/Radius proxy/DHCP on the controller, then you can safely reload the controller even during the office hours since data and control planes are local to APs in that case. Otherwise,you should reload it after work hours.

2- The first and most important thing you must check is that all the AP models you are using have an upgrade path to WiNG7. If they do, you can first upgrade the controller, APs will stay adopted and functional with firmware mismatch. It depends on how the APs are deployed, if you have multiple RF-Domains you can upgrade APs by RF-Domains. There are few caveats when the APs are in firmware mismatch state:

a) No new configuration can be pushed to the APs while they are in firmware mismatch state.

b) You may experience issues with client auth if you are using the controller either as a Radius Server or a Captive Portal server.

3- It is not recommended to have both WiNG5 and WiNG7 APs on the same controller, and more importantly on the same site if it's a single site deployment. The sooner you can upgrade all the APs to WiNG7 the better. In terms of functionality it may not break the system but there are services like Smart-RF, statistics aggregation etc. which will be affected while you run two different versions of WiNG on the APs.

Regards,

Ovais