Recommended Firmware for NX5500 and 7632/8432 APs

[dleboeuf]

Hello everyone, I was recently asked by a customer to upgrade their NX5500 WLC. They are currently running 5.9.8.4 firmware on the WLC. There is a mix of 7632 and 8432 APs running on the WLC. What is the current recommended firmware for this controller/APs, I can’t seem to find much documentation. On article 000088566 it just says N/A for the NX5500, 7632, and 8432.

Following that question, I have never upgraded the firmware on any of the hardware above, but it looks like all of the APs are a part of the Adopted Device Upgrade. So when I load the new firmware on the NX5500, will the firmware automatically get pushed down to those APs as well? Do I need to do any manual upgrades on them or no?

Thank you!

[Christopher_Fra]

Hello,

      The NX5500 carries all supported AP firmware for that release. Only the RFS controllers have limitations, due to limit flash partition size.

By default, all Wing controllers have AP auto-upgrade enabled. Please be careful with using auto if the deployment has remote site APs (L3 adoption) and/or MESH APs. 

If the deployment does have remote site APs and/or MESH, strongly advise disabling auto upgrade on the NX and manual upgrade each RF-domain with no reboot. 

Please follow the Knowledge Article that Chris Kelly previously provided. 

[ckelly · Accepted solution]

dleboeuf,

If the customer has current entitlement to software support, you can upgrade the NX500 and APs to WiNG-7. (All devices you’ve listed are supported under WiNG-7)

That other article appears to need updating. I’ll pass that along to GTAC.

You are essentially correct about the upgrade process though. Once the controller is upgraded, it will/might contain the various AP model firmware also. I say ‘might’ because it’s possible due to memory constraints that the controller will not contain AP firmware for EVERY model AP that it supports. If that happens to be the case for you, then you simply need to download the AP firmware separately and then upload that firmware onto the controller...where it can then be used to push out to the relevant AP model type.

If you like doing things via the CLI, here’s a good Extreme article.

If you like the GUI, there should also be documentation for this as well.