Wired Intelligent Edge

Campus upgrade 3200/AP125 to 7205/AP315

We currently run 2 (primary/Secondary) 3200 controllers with 22 AP 125 access points, and 2 AP 135 access points. We will be migrating to 2 AP7205 controllers with 24 AP 335 access points.  We will also eventually add 6 AP 325 Air Monitors.  We also have an AMP installation. 

AP 125 supports up to 6.4    AP 135 requires 6.5

We do have ADP active, but generally manually  add our access points.   We are not using Certificate management, but may add that after the upgrade.  Also we are monitoring for rogue AP's, and have a guest network installation run by the controller. 

The controllers have direct lan access to the network the AP's reside on.

What is the best path to take for this upgrade.  Can we run both controllers at the same time, with communication between them, or do we need to do a complete failover?   

Any advice would be appreciated. 

There is multiple ways to achieve this and it is dependant on your environment however this may give you some ideas. I assume you are going to ArubaOS 6.5.x not AOS8. I personally would break this down into 2 stages. Firstly migrating the configuration and secondly migrating the AP's.

The Aruba 7205 requires a minimum of ArubaOS 6.4.3.0. Currently both the AP125 and AP135 supports ArubaOS 6.4.x. I would consider upgrading your existing environment to ArubaOS 6.4.x. Once this is completed you will be able to add the 7205 as local controllers in order to automatically copy the configuration across.  

Once the configuration has been copied across, remove the 7205's as local controllers from your existing estate. Upgrade both of the 7205's to the required firmware version (6.5.x) and convert this into your choice for redundancy (Master-Local, Master-Master/Backup) etc. 

When you start swapping out your AP's you will need to decide on the discovery method. If you disable ADP on the 3200 you will be able to run these in parallel and in the same broadcast domain. There is alternative Master Discovery methods such as DHCP/DNS which you can use to avoid statically setting each AP.

Sorry my title indicated 315' I typoed. We  will actually be using 335's.  

So I can migrate the controllers over with 6.4 as both support it.  

What is the best path to move to the 335's. My understanding is that they require 6.5.  We currently have DHCP managed by a windows server on those domains, All AP's are statically assigned by mac address.  ADP over IGMP is on, but AP is assigned manually.  If we where running considerably more AP's we would want to consider a different solution for AP  configuration. 

To allow for testing etc, does direct failover to the new devices become the better option?

No worries! So my suggestion of configuring the 7205's with AOS 6.4.x is only to connect them to the existing 3200 allows automatic migration the configuration (you can always do this manually if you wish....).  Once the 7205 have their configuration then disconnect them and treat them as their own deployment, so convert them into master/local or master/master.  Then you can proceed to upgrade to AOS 6.5.x and start with the 3xx AP's.

For testing purposes simply provision a single 3xx AP to the 7205 controller's and test. When you have completed your UAT, replace the 125,105 with the 3xx and shutdown the existing 3200.

This was very helpful,  I have a few other related questions. 

First, I think I am leaning towards standing this up fresh instead of the migration, but I needed to give management options. 

What firmware would your recommend for an extremely stable, and reliable implementation? Stay with 6.5 or move up to one of the 8 versions?  Do you have a recommendation. 

Also is there a good source for best practices for Controller, AP and Airwave installation?

Thanks, I appreciate the info. 

Hey, sorry for the delayed reply! Again with the firmware requirements it all depends on your enviroment. There is certain additional features and requirements that need researching prior to making a decision.

As for best practices and requirements, check out the Validated Reference Design Guides. These are best design practices and guides on how to design and configure Aruba kit.

https://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Validated-Reference-Design/tkb-p/Aruba-VRDs