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You may already know that Cisco has published End-of-Life (EoL) announcement for many of their WLC platforms as of 10th October 2016. This includes WiSM2, Cisco7510 and Cisco 5760 controllers recently. 10th April 2017 will be last day of purchase these products.
You can find related EoL announcemnt for each product shown below.
So if you already planning to buy any of these models, you should look for alternate products. You have limited choice to select from either 5520 or 8540.
I am sure 5508/2504 will follow the same path soon. So plan ahead your WLC replacement projects.
mrn-cciew 
Good Information sir
Thank you for this info, Rasika. It was actually a surprise for me as I thought converged access would be a good solution since it increased the overall wireless throughput through distributed architecture. So I don’t really understand why Cisco shut it down prematurely (they just invented it in 2013).
Have you ever deployed converged access in production network? Was it good and easy to manage as compared to CUWN?
I have deployed in limited scale in my campus. It works, but software codes quality is bad when it comes to wireless. Had to do numerous upgrade throughout past 2 years
Very difficult to troubleshoot (due to distributed nature). The other challenge is this architecture is not scalable in campus environment. Cisco has changed it is CA design recommendation over the years and now not advising to have any centralized MC.
Hence 5760 EoL/EoS announced. that does not mean they killed CA deployment though.
HTH
Rasika
My experiences with CA were:
– It’s buggy – you just can’t count on features to work out of the box
– Feature and new device support lags the traditional AireOS WLC
– It is possible – but adds quite a bit of complexity – to migrate between legacy and CA models on a big scale. The migration itself is complicated if you want to keep things working seamlessly during the transition
– There are some devices such as compact and legacy switches which do not participate in the CA model, whereby APs need to be directly connected to the switch that is the MA. This means you have to deploy to those “differently” and will always have to maintain some way of connecting APs through those devices (such as a separate non-CA VLAN). In an all-CA model with every switch supporting CA on a greenfields site it could be done – but in the real world that’s not often the case.
Nearly everyone I have spoken to about CA sees few advantages and a lot of disadvantages over the existing FlexConnect method of connecting AP’s that we already have which works well and is well tested.
It’s a shame because the capability and idea of distributed CAPWAP handoff, common policy and data visibility to local switches is good, but the CA model for doing so is just too difficult to make work in practice.
Hi Reuben,
Thank you very much for detail response . I agree with your view on this
Rasika
I am actually happy to see the 5760 go. We have had numerous issues through its lifespan and in fact had so many issues with them in our hospitals that Cisco swapped for us including installation at many of our facilities. I have always been a AirOS fan but will be sad to see the 5508 go as it has been a rock solid player for us. The 2504 is a good box as well but does not scale well for most of our locations.
The nail in the coffin for the 5760 in our enviroment was the lack of support for flexconnect and had we known that it was nver to be supported we would have never gone down its path.
BTW, Your site is awesome, Many Thanks.
Hi Evan,
Thanks for your story about 5760 & why you happy to see it going away 🙂
Even in campus environment, CA solution did not deliver promise in scaling. So in my campus as well, we haven’t expand it further. After couple of years deployment in few building, we have rolled back to AireOS for consistency and to have same experience to users.
Always you will have different experience in CA & AireOS environment and users will feel it if they have both setup together.
KIT
Rasika
Yes, that is very true and we feel that all users should have the same experience throughout all of our facilities.
I do have to give a little positive tick to the 5760 and that is the ability to upload any file on flash to ftp or tftp sever for backup inclusive of web-auth files. I have not discovered a method to do this on a 5500 or 2500 platform.