Wireless Access

Hello,

in the Release Notes from AirWave 7.5.4 I found the following information.

"In 7.5, migration from a 5.x install to 6.2 is not required, but 5.x support will end in a future release. A migration path from 5.x to 6.2 is available beginning with 7.5. Refer to the 7.5 User Guide for information about upgrading to CentOS 6.2."

When I reead the 7.5 User Guide there are no information for the upgrade to CentOS 6.2

Where Can I find these information?

regards,

Detlef

Hi,

I apologize for the confusion and I have forwarded your comments to our documentation team so the documentation can be corrected.

In the meantime, the upgrade process essentially requires a full backup->reinstall->restore process to migrate from CentOS 5.x to CentOS 6.2.

This means you will need do the following steps:

1. Backup your AirWave server following the backup instructions in the User Guide

2. Copy the backup off-server to a safe location.  

3. Do a clean installation from a 7.5.x or newer AirWave ISO that includes the CentOS 6.2 OS version (or your own installation of CentOS/RHEL 6.2).

4. Copy your backup to the newly installed CentOS 6.2 based server

5. Restore your backup following the instructions in the User Guide

If you have any questions or comments regarding the process or would like assistance please feel free to contact Aruba Support (support@arubanetworks.com)

This procedure will restore all of the VisualRF maps and ap placements?

Correct, as long as you make sure to grab valid AMP backups.  To be extra cautious, you can also get a VRF backup separately (note that there is a known bug where you can't get a VRF backup using Chrome.  Workaround is to use Firefox, Safari, or IE to get the VRF backup).  To get VRF backup -> go to VRF, right click on any campus or building, choose 'export floor plans', then select all and export.

One other suggestion when doing this upgrade.....  Reinstall the same version of Airwave as you are currently running. For example if you are running 7.6.2 and you grab a backup of 7.6.2, then reinstall 7.6.2.  I tried to take advantage of the maintenance window and installed 7.6.3 (along with centos 6.2) then restored a 7.6.2 backup.  It seemed to work but... there were some strange object not found errors when clicking on email alert links afterwords.  Support engineer said that's not supported (though not mentioned in the docs as an unsupported upgrade path).

I ended up having to reinstall 7.6.2 (along with centos 6.2) and then restoring the 7.6.2 backup and then upgrading to 7.6.3,  Whew!

@istong

True, recommended is to backup and restore on the same version.  But I would have expected the 7.6.2 backup to restore on 7.6.3 without complaining since there should only be minor changes between the 2 releases.  After the restore, a 'root; make' should have been run to correct any data offset (instead of having to reinstall all over again).

The unsupported part is taking a 7.5 backup and restoring on a 7.6 install (this is expected to fail based on new schema changes in the database).  Patched releases shouldn't matter as much as long as you're in the same version branch since the schema shouldn't be changed mid-release.