Migration From RFS6000 to Dual NX5500 in an active standby configuration

[OGB-NIKO]

Hello Extreme community

I have a two-part question and I am seeking your expertise and knowledge on this endeavor

1.We currently have a single RFS6000 controller centrally located at the high school we also have a total of 80 - 7181 APs spread out over four buildings with different subnets. We are in the process of bringing up an updated Wing network with two nx5500 controllers in an active standby configuration with a total of 123 AP 7532s [BUT ] because we are a school district I cannot bring down our active WIFI network mid school year in the middle of testing so I am not bringing the new controllers online but in the interim we want to start peace mealing the project by running new wires and mounting the 7532 Aps and powering them up to make sure they work in one of the buildings will these new APs plugged in affect our RFS6000 running wing 5.5 controller network ? We have no adoption policies in place on the current controller I have the DHCP options on my 2016 DC which help point the current APs back to the high school.

2.We were told by Extreme engineers that we could copy and paste the config file from our RFS6000
On to the master nx5500 that we are bringing online has anyone here done that or have the steps to do so? And should I config the dual controllers in an active standby after all my configurations license and AP adoptions are completed or before ?

Thank you for all your help

[OGB-NIKO · Accepted solution]

Response from support

As you are aware, current running-config from a controller (for example old RFS) would contain some specific device overrides (hostname, static IP address etc) which would not be valid or required on new controller (NX55). Keeping your migration scenario in mind, you can follow below approach:


1. Configure new NX5500 controllers (both primary and standby) with only basic config covering device level overrides (hostname, static IP address) as well as clustering and licenses.
2. Once both controllers form a cluster with correct cluster state, export running-config from primary NX5500 controller to a text file.
3. Export your existing running-config from old RFS controller to text file.
4. Now you can copy-paste config modules (profiles, WLANs etc) from old RFS controller to config file of new NX controller. In addition to config modules, you can also copy device-overrides of all existing access points from RFS config file to NX config file keeping config syntax in place.
5. Once you have new config file ready for NX controller, import it to primary controller and you will be ready to migrate your access points to new controller.

[ckelly]

Most likely so, yes.

[OGB-NIKO]

You think tech support could help me with this config ?

[ckelly]

In their default configuration, the new 7532's when connected to the network, will discover the controller either via layer-2 or through your DHCP option. Either way, once they reach the controller, they won't be fully adopted since you don't have a rule in the auto-provisioning policy to adopt them. You will see them in the RFS6K though showing as 'Pending Adoption'. That's it. Unless properly planned for though, don't attempt to run both the new NX controllers and the RFS controller at the same time.

You cannot verbatim copy the config from the RFS to the NX, but with a very small amount of massaging of the config, you can copy the config over. I've done it myself (NX to VX for example). It also depends on the delta between the WiNG versions. Example, I wouldn't want to try to migrate a WiNG 5.2 config over to a WiNG 5.9 system. But especially if the two configs come from the same version of WiNG, it's a pretty simple process to make the necessary changes.
My recommendations would be to build the Primary controller first and get everything working and then build the cluster. Some would argue to do it reversed. Technically, it doesn't matter though.