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Prime AP Migration Tool - Part 2
Tuesday, April 19, 2016 at 2:09PM In this second article on how to seamlessly upgrade your Cisco WLC, we explore the migration process and how to use the free tool IPTel have built for the purpose.
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If you've not see the other two articles in this series, you can catch up with the two links below - check the caveats, hints and tips before you start any upgrades:
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AP Migration Process
There are caveats later in this blog – familiarise yourself with these – if you are unsure of what you are doing do not run this script on a live network. Practice in your lab environment until you are happy with the process.
Access the tool from the IPTel website – here’s the link: https://www.iptel.com.au/ap-migration-tool.html
You will need to make a choice when moving APs – do you upgrade the spare WLC to the new code and upgrade APs on their way over, or just do a straight move then upgrade the primary WLC and upgrade them on the way back. There’s pros and cons to each method.
At some point you need to upload the new WLC code to your controller – this can be done at any stage prior to, or after offloading all the APs.
A screen shot of the tool is shown below:
Prime AP Migration Tool – Entry Screen
The process is as follows:
- Select the ‘Move AP Script’ radio button
- Enter the ‘From’ details in the Controllers section (hostname and IP address of your current Primary WLC)
- Enter the ‘To’ details for the spare / holding platform WLC to move the APs to
- In the Access Points box, paste in a list of all your APs
- Click the generate button
This will generate a list of commands to be pasted to the WLC GUI. When pasted into the GUI, APs will have the order of their Primary controller changed – the commands will then reload the AP and it will move to the secondary platform.
Once all APs are moved, you can upgrade the primary WLC (or HA if its in HA mode) without affecting any of the APs.
When you’re ready to move the APs back to the original WLC, select the ‘Reset AP Script’ button and click the Generate button – this will generate the reverse script to return the APs back to the Primary WLC.
Pre-download
To reduce the impact of the upgrade (speed up the process), pre-download the new AP image to the APs before moving them to a WLC that uses a different code version. Note that without a pre-download, APs will have to download the correct image then reload to boot that image when you move them between WLCs with different code versions! To do a pre-download, you need to download the new code onto the WLC but don't reboot onto it. You will then be able to pre-download that code to all APs (or a single AP at a time if you want to test) either via the GUI or the CLI.
Liability Disclaimer
We supply the tools on this website free of charge for the wireless community use. Note with all our tools the liability disclaimer – we do our best to make these tools as useful as we can, but accept no liability for their use or misuse:
https://www.iptel.com.au/terms-and-conditions-for-usage-of-provided-tools.html
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