AP cutover migration from 5520 to 9800-WL during

[JasonGorman1808]

Good afternoon,

A new client is splitting off from a parent company this Fall. They current have AP1852E-B-K9 and WLC5200 and they want to migrate to 9800-WL. I will have an instance of the 9800-WL stood up before cutover, but once the WAN is moved from parent to child, the APs will be in “no man’s land”. My question is, how can we provision the APs on the 9800 post cutover? 

Thank you in advance!

[eglinsky2012]

I assume you mean the old WLC is a 5520, not a 5200, and the new one is 9800-CL and not -WL?

Regardless, will the 9800 WLC be reachable from the APs prior to severing the WAN link to where the old WLC resides? Or is the 9800 at a different remote site and not reachable from the APs until after cutting the site over to a new WAN link to a new remote site where the 9800 resides?

[JasonGorman1808]

Sorry for the confusion. Current is 5520 and new will be 9800WL. The 9800 will not be reachable until the WAN is migrated. 

Thanks

[David Ritter]

So upon cutover, the orphaned AP's will recycle and (by default) do a DNS lookup for Cisco-capwap-controller as well as their old targets.  So please do have a DNS entry for the 9800.  They will then attach, download fresh image and land in all the default-profiles..  All that's left is to log on and reassign the AP's to their proper profiles.  There is a way to do a bulk assignment via a mac list but I have never used it.   

[eglinsky2012 · Accepted solution]

Okay. I forgot to ask, will the 9800 have the same AP management IP address as the 5520 or a different IP?

Assuming a different IP, I'd suggest utilizing the High Availability config of the WAPs to specify the 9800 hostname/IP as Secondary (assuming the 5520 is already specified as Primary). That way, when the old WAN link goes down and the 5520 becomes unreachable, the WAPs will then move on and join the 9800.

Be aware of the time this will take. It will take a minute or so for the WAP to figure out that the 5520 is unreachable. Then it will go to discover mode, contact the 9800, download the 9800 code, and reboot; in total, that will take about another 10-15 minutes (or longer if the WAN link is slow/subject to packet loss or fragmentation).

If your DHCP/DNS servers, IP subnets, etc. change as well, you could utilize DHCP/DNS on the new servers to point to the 9800 controller IP via DHCP option 43 or a DNS entry for cisco-capwap-controller.yourdomain.com

[marce1000]

 - Adding to other replies  , during staging and or before taking the 9800-WL into production    have a checkup of it's configuration with the CLI command show tech wireless and feed the output to : Wireless Config Analyzer
                             Consider this a requirement and must do !

 M.