topic Re: WLC 8540 CIMC upgrade in Wireless

WLC 8540 CIMC upgrade

CiaranB — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 15:11:27 GMT

Hi, has anyone else have difficulty configuring an IMM address for the secondary WLC in a HA pair in order to carry out the CIMC upgrade?

We have a pair of 8540s in HA. While running 8.5.140.0 I attempted to configure an IMM address on both WLC units but there was no IMM config commands available on the secondary unit.

I appear to hit upon the following bug https://bst.cloudapps.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCvf57867 ?
I upgraded to 8.10.151.0, which according to Cisco documentation would fix the bug, but after the upgrade I am still in the same situation i.e. I am unable to configure the IMM IP address on the secondary WLC as there are no IMM commands available.
The dhcp workaround does not work. When connected to a switchport I cannot get a mac address and it does not appear to do any kind of dhcp request.

I tested the CIMC upgrade on a 5520 stand alone and it worked fine.

Finally, while ssh'd onto the non-active WLC there are a limited number of commands compared to the active unit. I'm assuming this is normal?

Am I missing something? Any help would be greatly appreciated

Re: WLC 8540 CIMC upgrade

Leo Laohoo — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 15:27:30 GMT

Break the HA and then configure the CIMC.

Re: WLC 8540 CIMC upgrade

Arshad Safrulla — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 21:58:40 GMT

How my team fixed the issue for one of my customers,

o Save the configuration on the active node
o Have switch over initiated using the following command: "redundancy force-switchover"
o Have the configuration of the CIMC done once the secondary is up using the following commands:

* (Cisco Controller) >imm address
* (Cisco Controller) >imm username password
* (Cisco Controller) >imm summary <-- To verify the configuration once you are done.

o After that save the configuration on the WLC.
o Then Fail back to the Primary using the command : "redundancy force-switchover"

Re: WLC 8540 CIMC upgrade

Rich R — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 11:11:54 GMT

That bug was opened for me but I've never tested or verified the fix which came much later. After we found the problem we made sure we always configured the CIMC before enabling HA so haven't had to deal with it since then.

I believe that all the fix actually does is stop the WLC from trying to sync the CIMC config between primary and secondary which is what is what it was doing before when I found the problem.

I would do as @Arshad Safrulla suggests which should work properly now with the fix in place (it didn't before because it always kept trying to sync the IMM config you entered to both chassis).

Re: WLC 8540 CIMC upgrade

Rich R — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 11:14:22 GMT

With the fix that shouldn't be necessary @Leo Laohoo though I have not tested it myself. The procedure @Arshad Safrulla suggests should work but will be useful to get confirmation that it does work.

Re: WLC 8540 CIMC upgrade

CiaranB — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 13:25:39 GMT

I followed @Arshadsaf suggestion and was able to successfully upgraded the CIMC utility on both controllers without any disruption to services.

Thank you all for your replies.