First I tried 8.0.121.0 and none of the 1252's would join the updated controller. Downgraded to 8.0.120.0 and the AP's would then join, I retested it by upgrading again to 8.0.121.0 and the same thing happened so I settled on 8.0.120.0. Our 8540 however runs on 8.1.120.0 but it only hosts 3702's AP's.
We have been running 8.0.120.0 for over a year too and upgrading to 8.0.133.0 to support -B domain in the US and both are stable. I would not recommend upgrading to 8.2.x yet as it is still new unless there is need for it. Keep in mind of the unsupported APs (1242s, 1252s and 1262s) on 8.1 and higher codes. Good luck!!
At my current customer we (still) run 8.0.121.0 on all of the 5508 and WiSM2 setups with around 3000 APs (mostly 3700s, 3500s and 1242s). Clients types ranges from old truck terminals up to all kinds of BYOD. We upgraded the whole infrastructure 10 months ago because of the security vulnerability which was patched in the 8.0.121.0 release.
It has been "Russian roulette" with AirOS software for quite a few years to be honest. However, it does depends on your situation which release is the best fit. A lot of bugs only hit particular features, AP types or clients. Within the design phase I always try to keep the infrastructure "as simple" as possible and stay away from funky new features, unless it is really greenfield and there is time to perform a lot of testing upfront. In the end the user experience is what counts.
If there is no functional need to upgrade I would stay with 8.0 and wait for a stable 8.3 release and skip 8.1 & 8.2. In our situation (will still have a lot of 1242s in the field) I foresee two kind of platforms: legacy based on 8.0 and new style with 8.3. This way new access-point types can be deployed and certain sites can leverage new features.
Here is my 2 cents... if your environment is stable, there is no need to upgrade unless you are forced to because of AP support or new controller support. I don't believe any features mandates an upgrade because your environment is already working as is. We have a mix of 8.0.111.3 (MS version) that isn't stable in our environment and now we have v8.2 due to 5520's and bugs on v8.0.111.3. Now I'm not a fan or escalation images at all so we were looking for an v8.2 to run and here are my thought so far.
We initially ran v8.2.100.0 in three large buildings in one of our campus. This fixed so many issue that we were running into on v8.0.111.3. Then one another few sites we upgraded to v8.2.110.0 and that seemed fine for a bit but then we discovered bugs that affected MS on v8.2.x. We also then tested with the v8.2 MR3 beta and that seemed to fix our MS bugs but the biggest issue with v8.2.x was NDP with RX-SOP not set to auto and the 5ghz stops sending beacons, we have 3702's. v8.2.130.0 is running in one of our sites now one EMEA and it is working well. Clients are not complaining of issues and we also leverage Skype data to determine stability. So far so good in our building and now we are looking at pushing v8.2.130.0 to a few others.
Here is my thing however, I'm not in located in the building where we have v8.2.130.0, so I have to look at our Skype data and the voice of users onsite. This gives me 90% confidence that everything is working well, but the 10% is due to past experience of not actually being onsite. The main issue we started to look at v8.2 is because in our large campus with three buildings, we redesigned the environment for density. This site was one of our worst sites for wireless and we have had Cisco also go out a few time to review and provide feedback. After we had Cisco perform another post survey, we looked at the data and I worked with the engineer whom performed the survey and that is how we came up with a new design. We almost added 30-40% more AP's and an AP in every conference room and MPR. I went onsite for two weeks to review the environment and until I got onsite, I would of never knew that the code we were running was not stable. All the rework we did to improve density and end user experience would of not worked. I saw things when I was connected on the wifi that I never seen or heard about before. I got permission to upgrade one of the buildings to v8.2.100.0 and things just all of a sudden worked. We then upgraded all the buildings and ever since, we have only received less than a handful or wireless tickets, most of all are client related or not true wireless tickets.
So if your environment is stable, leave it! Make sure when testing a new code that you get good data and user experience to determine if things are working well and also go through a test plan to verify thing are working. TACACS is broken in all v8.2 code except for v8.2.130.0. We do have to test v8.3 due to having multiple tacacs servers and two factor auth which is only going to be fixed in v8.3MR1. So for now, we only point to one tacacs server and also are forced to test eventually on one of our building with v8.3.who.know:)
Thanks for the input, Scott! Much appreciated. As my environment was stable it kept me away from the wireless for a while now.
Now with some free time I thought revamping this and maybe installing a more up to date SW version on the WLCs. But based on your input guys, I ll sure dedicate my time to something else. Stability is king for me!
Any plans to ever support ATF for x800 series APs? Not one release have supported this feature. And the recommended 8.2.166.0 deletes VLAN-mappings in FlexConnect groups when trying to delete the AVC FlexConnect mapping. Which it by the way won´t let you.
The "TAC Recommended AireOS Build" document says "The following platforms are EOLed in 8.5: AP1600, AP2600, AP3500, AP3600, AP1552 (128MB version), AP802, WLC2504, WLC5508, WLC7510, WLC8510, WiSM2."
But the release notes of version 8.5 have against information that is supported.
Thanks for the feedback. By "EOLed in 8.5", I meant - 8.5 is the last train that supports these platforms. I now see that this is ambiguous, and will improve this in the next version.
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