To go along with the new 3500 and 1260 APs releases, the 7.0 code is finally public for the Cisco wireless Controllers. Cisco has increased capacity on the 5500 model controller to 500 APs as well.
Cisco released their 7.0 code train for their Unified Wireless products this week, and while bringing obvious support for the new 1260 and 3500 APs, it also adds a few more needed features, such as increased AP count on the controller.
With 7.0.98.0 you have a few things that have been added. The first is the slightly overdue ability to now have 500 APs managed by a single 5500 series controller, which should make some customers happier now. Previously the 5508 had a maximum AP count of 250. For many enterprise customers that don’t see 100% utilization on every single AP, having 500 APs on a single controller that has 8 gig uplinks will be more than enough wired bandwidth to sustain their needs. It’ll also help remove any latency added by inter-controller roaming that may have been necessary in some deployments.
Cisco has also given customers a free one in this code release. OfficeExtend (The “Give an AP to your CEO and it’ll serve campus wireless at their house via an encrypted tunnel, and allow them a local SSID that they can manage for their non-work stuff” service is now included in the base license, as well as support for indoor MESH without an additional license. It’s not clear what if anything will be done for customers who bought the “plus” licenses in the past just for those services, though I’m sure if you hassle your account team you might be able to get something out of them. These features should have always been included in the base license.
While this code also includes all of the features around air quality index and spectrum intelligence, I’ll not really cover that here, since I covered that in my post about the 3500.
Another interesting problem Cisco fixed, is the silent client problem that you often see with statically addressed printers, scales, and other ‘receive data only’ devices that generally don’t speak to the network until spoken to. This problem arises when using proxy ARP, which is generally a good practice, so you aren’t blasting ARP requests out of all your APs for the clients. Cisco has added passive client support, which is a hybrid proxy ARP when you enable it on certain WLANs. It will allow some ARP requests out over wireless to get a client out of “sleep” state and then returns back to doing proxy ARP again.
Cisco is also now supporting 500 APs upgrading at a time, which is certainly nice when doing large scale upgrades. However, it’s not as imperative any longer with the ability to pre-upgrade APs before rebooting the controller. You can generally do an “easy” upgrade with a downtime of under 5 minutes in a large site, or a slightly more complicated upgrade that causes no real downtime (Unless you have a lot of tunneled traffic between controllers) at all. On the WCS front, I’m most happy that Cisco added northbound alarms, making it much more trivial to integrate WCS with tools like OpenNMS, Netcool, etc. They have also finally said they “support” Firefox now.
There are quite a few other items added for the WLC and WCS. I’ve been using both the WLC and WCS 7.x code for several months now, and it’s been pretty solid for me. You can read the main highlights of the release notes here.
Overall, it’s a good upgrade with some much needed features. A few features are innovative and new to Cisco, and a few features are playing catch-up with other vendors. WCS has added a few things that were really needed, but have been available in products like Airwave in some form or another for a while. If you’re already a Cisco shop, you should start testing 7.0! (Note that 7.0 is currently marked as an early deployment release)
