New Appliance Wireless Migration Plan Recommendations?

[CSCO11733516]

Hey guys-

  We are currently running a Cisco WISM that manages roughly 500 AP's (1230) in Production today.  The Wireless environment equipment is now going to be replaced with 2x8510's for Production, 2x5508's as Guest Anchor WLC's for Guests, and Aironet 3702i AP's (upgrading to roughly 1200).  The software versions on the WLC will more than likely be 8.x, as right now we have the Guest's running 8.x and the Prod running 7.6.x.  All of this equipment is physically located in one building and location, nothing exiting over the WAN to other sites.

Over the course of the past couple of months we have replicated our existing environment and performed testing and staging on the new equipment.  We now have things running as expected, with one floor currently being dedicated to the new Wireless equipment.

I've searched for something related to this topic, but was unable to find anything.  Are there any recommendations on how to go about replacing the old equipment with the new equipment, so that everything could be phased out seamlessly with the least amount of downtime?  This would not be something we could do in one shot, at the moment we are planning to do floor by floor until we have replaced all of the old equipment.

I was wondering if maybe there is a way to anchor the Primary and Guest SSID's onto the new WLC's or something.  Just looking for some input, recommendations, or somewhere that I can be steered to figure this out.

[Leo Laohoo]

Hardware-wise, the mounting brackets for the 1230 and the 3700 are not the same.  

What you could do is pre-stage the new APs, before installing them, get the APs to join to the new controllers.  Make sure the new APs are in the right AP Groups, for instance, and RF Profiles are correct.  

[George Stefanick]

I replaced a large enterprise last year on the controller side and now doing 1400 3700 on the access layer this year. 

1. Bring the controllers up in the same vlans. The management and client to allow seamless roll over (ip wise).

2. Insure any changes you want to do is included in the roll out. For example, consistent interface naming, making sure wlans and in the same order across controllers, and such.. 

3. I sure your wlan configs are identical don't go cowboy 

4. Cut over small broken away areas first to the new gear. Give it time to bake before moving forward in mass 

5. Open a TAC case in advance. You pay for Tac use it just in case you have problems. Leave the ticket open as lone as you like. Detail what your plans are so if you have issues you can quckly refernce a Tac case number 

6. As you move new areas over base line clients and APs before and afte the cut over. Watch the radius server for erros and alerts for mis configurations 

7. Keep up on release notes and bug before you move forward. You don't want to step into a pile of poop .. 

8. Sine you are updatimg APs. Watch rrm and passive survey the area to make sire RF IS GOOD.

Hope le this helps 

[CSCO11733516]

Thanks to the both of you for the provided information.

@George - Thanks for these steps, this was helpful.

When you say bring up the WLC's in the same VLAN, you are referring to the old WLC's and the new WLC's, correct?

[CSCO11733516]

One more thing just came to mind as well, along with this upgrade and deployment.  We are going to be introducing ISE (physical appliance) running 1.2 into the WLAN environment.  It will be used for the new equipment and for all of the SSID's that exist (currently 5).

My question/concerns are, when would be the recommended time to push out the ISE and Authentication Policies to the new environment during this whole process?  Before, during, after....

How will those changes affect authentication to the existing Wireless environment before the switch-over?

[George Stefanick]

We have ISE as well. I installed it myself when it first came out. So I know ISE pretty well. 

If I were you. I would break them up in two different projects. Get the wireless stable then migrate over to ISE. If  you are new to ISE it can be a little bit of a bear to get started. Once stable start to move over your WLAN IDs as needed. 

Hope this help! 

[George Stefanick]

Correct. If you want as seamless as possible bring them up in the same vlans.