Cisco Prime Provisioning 12.3 upgrade question

[MICHAEL CARTER]

Hi,

My customer has implemeneted Prime Provisioning 11.6 with Very Large OVA, and have more than 1520000 User ID's, what's the opinion on how do they now upgrade to version 12.3, which only supports a maximum 150000 User ID's.    

Is auto-provisioning supported in 12.3?

Best regards,

Michael.

[Anthony Gerbic]

If you meant 152K userIDs and not 1.52M userIDs then PCP will work ok with 152K userIDs.  Yes it is 2K over the published figure but you will not notice a performance problem. I think the published figure should have been about 200K userIDs so I will ask my PCP PM to make sure the user docs are updated.

ASP is supported in all PCP 11.x and12.x releases as long as CUCM is 10.5(2) and later. Prior to CUCM 10.5(2), CUCM did not have an Authenticate only LDAP setting which is the recommended setting for CUCM when PCP is doing the LDAP sync with the ASP function.

[ramaswamy]

We have a 11.5 version now, not fully used. Now everyone is saying (including cisco) to go to 12.X version which is a major version with new IOS.

Is there a good document how to upgrade 11.5 to 12.X in a virtualized environment?

[Anthony Gerbic]

Because PCP uses a new OS, a migration is needed to get from 11.x to 12.1.   All 11.x must pass through 12.1 to get to a later rev. You can go from 11.5 to 12.1 to 12.4 (the latest revision).  The 12.1 installation guide has the methods (live migration or new install with restore of backup) available.  Once on 12.1 you can go directly to 12.4 in one step with the normal upgrade "app bundle" file.

Keep in mind that VMware has made a change at their rev EXSi 6.5 so if you have an earlier version (6.0 or earlier) we have one OVA or if you have the VMware EXSi 6.5 you can use the other OVA.

[ramaswamy]

Thank you, which method is preferred?

[Anthony Gerbic]

Your choice.

If you are short on VM resources and cannot spin up a second VM, you can use the backup of the 11.x revision to another server, install a fresh 12.1 and then migrate the backup into the 12.1 server. 

If you have some spare VM resources and can spin up a fresh VM, you can just install a fresh 12.1 and point the migration to the running, but idle, 11.x server.  PCP 12.1 will pull the 11.x database files over to the new 12.1 server. You can then make sure the 12.1 server is running ok and shut down the old 11.x server.

The first case, make sure the 11.x server is idle/maintenance mode and take a shapshot or make a backup clone to assure you have a backup of the 11.x server in case you should need to fire it up again.  In the second case you can just archive the 11.x VM for a while in case you need it again.

Remember that when the migration takes place, some data is migrated to the new database, not just restored.  When you later upgrade from 12.1 to 12.4, the database will go through an in-place migration since we changed the encryption level and have encrypted more settings/data in the database.  So don't attempt to use a backup of one rev to restore to another, which I have seen people do, as each recent release has some database changes.

One thing you will notice with each upgrade, the process will get simpler and have more onscreen status messages so you can see what is taking place.