How to Upgrade the Cisco Wireless Controller 5508 from version 8.0.121.0 to 8.0.140.0

This tutorial will walk you thru the simple steps of upgrading the software on the Cisco Wireless Controller 5508 from version 8.0.121.0 to 8.0.140.0.

First, you will need to do is to download the Wireless IOS version 8.0.140.0 from the Cisco support site to your TFTP server. if you don’t have a TFTP server then there are many free ones out there that you can download

Few things to check before the upgrade

Check the version of the Wireless Controller
Check the version of all the access points

You can run the command below to check version of all the access points from the command line

“show ap image all”

below is the screenshot that shows the variables that all need to in there click on download

Mode of Transfer
Path to be specified
IOS code file name

Click on download the start the process for the upgrade and click “OK” to accept the message

First message that shows the code transfer process by stating “TFTP Code transfer starting”

You can also check the progress of the upgrade by looking at your TFTP server progress bar

shows the network interface IP that is used by the TFTP server
Progress bar for the upgrade process

You can watch the progress on each step and the browser updates automatically

Below is the dcreen hsot that shows that the IOS is now being saved to flash

Now it is pushing the AP image files to flash for the all AP types

The below screen shows that the upgrade is now complete and also states that you can pre-download the image to all the access points to save downtime – this is not a needed step and access points will download the code on their owen when the controller reboots, but is recomneded to do it ahead of time

You can check the version of all the access points by running the “show ap image all ” like in the below screen shot you can see the primary image and pre-downloaded image on the top two access points