Cisco Catalyst 9120 Access Points provide a seamless wireless experience anywhere and goes beyond the Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard. The access points provide integrated security, resiliency, and operational flexibility as well as increased network intelligence.

In the Cisco’s intent-based networks of all sizes, the Cisco Catalyst 9120 APs scale to the growing demands of IoT devices while fully supporting the latest innovations and new technologies.

Note	The following C9120 model VIDs are supported in this release: C9120AXI: VID06 and earlier

• Before downgrading or upgrading the Cisco Controller to another release check for APs or AP modes support. Ensure that only supported APs are connected and also the APs are moved to supported modes on the release that the controller is upgraded or downgraded to.

• On executing the show tech-support command on a Cisco 9100 AP, if the displayed result is empty, as a workaround, logout and relogin to the same access point using SSH and run the command. For more information, see CSCvo28881.

• Legacy clients that require RC4 or 3DES encryption type are not supported in Local EAP authentication.

• If you downgrade to Release 8.0.140.0 or 8.0.15x.0, and later upgrade to a later release and and also have the multiple country code feature configured, then the configuration file could get corrupted. When you try to upgrade to a later release, special characters are added in the country list causing issues when loading the configuation. For more information, see CSCve41740.

  Note	Upgrade and downgrade between other releases does not result in this issue.

• After downloading the new software to the Cisco APs, it is possible that a Cisco AP may get stuck in an upgrading image state. In such a scenario, it might be necessary to forcefully reboot the controller to download a new controller software image or to reboot the controller after the download of the new controller software image. You can forcefully reboot the controller by entering the reset system forced command.

• It is not possible to download some of the older configurations from the controller because of the Multicast and IP address validations. See the "Restrictions on Configuring Multicast Mode" section in the Cisco Wireless Controller Configuration Guide for detailed information about platform support for global multicast and multicast mode.

• If you are downgrading from Release 8.9 to an earlier release, any local policy to WLAN ID mapping wherein the local policy ID is greater than 255 is lost after the downgrade. If necessary, you can modify the policy mapping so that a local policy whose ID is greater than 255 is not used.

  You can check for the local policy ID in either of the following ways:

  • CLI: Enter the show policy summary command.

  • GUI: Navigate to Security > Local Policies. On the Policy List page, the policy ID is displayed along with the policy name.

• When a client sends an HTTP request, the controller intercepts it for redirection to the login page. If the HTTP GET request that is intercepted by the controller is longer than 2000 bytes, the controller drops the packet. Track the Caveat ID CSCuy81133 for a possible enhancement to address this restriction.

• When downgrading from one release to an earlier release, you might lose the configuration from your current release. The workaround is to reload the previous controller configuration files that are saved in the backup server, or to reconfigure the controller.

• When you upgrade a controller to an intermediate release, wait until all the APs that are associated with the controller are upgraded to the intermediate release before you install the latest controller software. In large networks, it can take some time to download the software on each AP.

• You can upgrade to a new release of the controller software or downgrade to an earlier release even if FIPS is enabled.

• When you upgrade to the latest software release, the software on the APs associated with the controller is also automatically upgraded. When an AP is loading software, each of its LEDs blinks in succession.

• Controllers support standard SNMP MIB files. MIBs can be downloaded from the software download page on Cisco.com.

• The controller software that is factory-installed on your controller and is automatically downloaded to the APs after a release upgrade and whenever an AP joins a controller. We recommend that you install the latest software version available for maximum operational benefit.

• Ensure that you have a TFTP, HTTP, FTP, or SFTP server available for the software upgrade. Follow these guidelines when setting up a server:

  • Ensure that your TFTP server supports files that are larger than the size of controller software image. Some TFTP servers that support files of this size are tftpd32 and the TFTP server within Cisco Prime Infrastructure. If you attempt to download the controller software image and your TFTP server does not support files of this size, the following error message appears:

    TFTP failure while storing in flash

  • If you are upgrading through the distribution system network port, the TFTP or FTP server can be on the same subnet or a different subnet because the distribution system port is routable.

• The controller Bootloader stores a copy of the active primary image and the backup image. If the primary image becomes corrupted, you can use the Bootloader to boot with the backup image.

  With the backup image stored before rebooting, from the Boot Options menu, choose Option 2: Run Backup Image to boot from the backup image. Then, upgrade with a known working image and reboot controller.

• You can control the addresses that are sent in the Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) discovery responses when NAT is enabled on the Management Interface, using the following command:

  config network ap-discovery nat-ip-only {enable | disable}

  The following are the details of the command:

  enable —Enables use of NAT IP only in a discovery response. This is the default. Use this command if all the APs are outside the NAT gateway.

  disable —Enables use of both NAT IP and non-NAT IP in a discovery response. Use this command if APs are on the inside and outside the NAT gateway, for example, Local Mode and OfficeExtend APs are on the same controller.

  Note	To avoid stranding of APs, you must disable the AP link latency (if enabled) before you use the disable option in the config network ap-discovery nat-ip-only command. To disable AP link latency, use the config ap link-latency disable all command.

• Do not power down the controller or any AP during the upgrade process. If you do this, the software image might get corrupted. Upgrading the controller with a large number of APs can take as long as 30 minutes, depending on the size of your network. However, with the increased number of concurrent AP upgrades supported, the upgrade time should be significantly reduced. The APs must remain powered, and controller must not be reset during this time.

• After you perform the following functions on the controller, reboot it for the changes to take effect:

  • Enable or disable LAG.

  • Enable a feature that is dependent on certificates (such as HTTPS and web authentication).

  • Add a new license or modify an existing license.

    Note	Reboot is not required if you are using Right-to-Use licenses.

  • Increase the priority of a license.

  • Enable HA.

  • Install the SSL certificate.

  • Configure the database size.

  • Install the vendor-device certificate.

  • Download the CA certificate.

  • Upload the configuration file.

  • Install the Web Authentication certificate.

  • Make changes to the management interface or the virtual interface.

• Cisco WLAN Express Setup Over-the-Air Provisioning

• Mobility controller functionality in converged access mode

• VPN Termination (such as IPsec and L2TP)

• Internal DHCP Server

• Mobility controller functionality in converged access mode

• VPN termination (such as IPsec and L2TP)

• Fragmented pings on any interface

• Cisco Umbrella

• Software-defined access

• Domain-based ACLs

• Internal DHCP server

• Cisco TrustSec

• Access points in local mode

• Mobility or Guest Anchor role

• Wired Guest

• Multicast

  Note	FlexConnect locally switched multicast traffic is bridged transparently for both wired and wireless on the same VLAN. FlexConnect APs do not limit traffic based on IGMP or MLD snooping.

• FlexConnect central switching in large-scale deployments

  Note	FlexConnect central switching is supported in only small-scale deployments, wherein the total traffic on controller ports is not more than 500 Mbps. FlexConnect local switching is supported.

• Central switching on Microsoft Hyper-V deployments

• AP and Client SSO in High Availability

• PMIPv6

• Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS)

• EoGRE (Supported only in local switching mode)

• Workgroup bridges

• Client downstream rate limiting for central switching

• SHA2 certificates

• Controller integration with Lync SDN API

• Cisco OfficeExtend Access Points

For detailed information about feature support on Cisco Aironet Wave 2 APs, see:

Note	For Cisco Aironet 1850 Series AP technical specifications with details on currently supported features, see the Cisco Aironet 1850 Series Access Points Data Sheet.

• Load-based call admission control (CAC). Mesh networks support only bandwidth-based CAC or static CAC

• High availability (Fast heartbeat and primary discovery join timer)

• AP acting as supplicant with EAP-FASTv1 and 802.1X authentication

• AP join priority (Mesh APs have a fixed priority)

• Location-based services

• Dynamic Mesh backhaul data rate.

  Note	We recommend that you keep the Bridge data rate of the AP as auto.

• Background scanning

• Noise-tolerant fast convergence

• MAC Authentication FlexConnect Local Authentication

• Noise-tolerant fast convergence

• Static WEP