Upgrade options for an older Ruckus Wifi install

[robk]

We currently have a pair of Zone Director 3000's running 9.12.2.0 with a mix of 7363 & R500 access points.

 

We may be able to get hold of some R510 access points to replace the 7363's but don't think we can downgrade the R510's to V9.

 

Not sure if we can upgrade the ZD3000's if we replace the 7363's?

 

(Another school in the trust has DFE connecting the classroom funding, so we are trying to get as much impact as possible by reusing what they are taking out!)

 

Thoughts anyone?

[Net-Ctrl]

Hi @robk - the R510s will work from v 9.13 on the ZD. The 7363s work up to 9.12 so you would need to swap out all of the 7363s with R500/R510 etc AP and run at version 9.13 or greater if you wanted to look at keeping your same infrastructure.

 

If you have a support contract on the ZD then you can upgrade the FW. If not, then the upgrade might fail the ZD will check whether there is an active support entitlement file. I'm not sure how well this works though so you might be ok. Alternatively, you could get a 1 year support renewal if it did cause issues as the EOS support goes through to Dec 2023. That would then allow you to upg your FW.

 

If you were to upgrade your 7363s you could also migrate your management platform to SmartZone which would support R500/R510 - albeit the R500s on an older FW code.

[JRA]

Ahhh it's like you're here! Just taken the helm myself at a (rather decent) place but with ancient WiFi. One Ruckus ZD1112 on 9.8.3.0. Hopefully I'm not too late also.

 

I've expanded what we had with more R500 APs (we were licensed for 25 but only used 18 or 19 when I got here.) Mostly buying them off eBay, scraping the cobwebs and barnacles off them and downgrading or cross-then-downgrading firmware. Now have all 25 provisioned and ready. And come Easter it'll all be going in the bin but hey at least until then I can beef up what we have.

 

With the R500s I found the ZD will, in the process of adopting them, try to downgrade the firmware itself from 100.1.0.0.194 to 9.8.3.0.14, but getting them onto a downgrade-able version was the thing. If an AP arrived on a firmware that'd just go down nicely using R500_100.1.0.0.194.BL7 then all well and good and the ZD would do the rest on adoption, but if not I found I needed to stick on the solo ap firmware 104.0.0.0.1347 to get it to behave, and THEN put on R500_100.1.0.0.194 and proceed.

 

More here: https://community.ruckuswireless.com/t5/ZoneDirector/R500-wont-downgrade-from-10-1-1-0-55-to-9-9-0-0-216-on-ZD-or/td-p/16333

[Oaktech]

We threw ours away and went Unifi.

 

The only thing I will say is if you consider that as a route - as a current Ruckus user to get a signal range vaguely similar you'll need the Access Point U6 Long-Range.