MDS R77.30 to R80.10 Upgrade Recommendations

[Jesse]

I have a small-ish MDS environment, with only about a dozen CMAs, with fairly small policies in each. I want to upgrade to R80.10 mgmt, and have a spare Smart1. From everyone's experiences so far, what of the below options would be the better approach?

1. Manual move - Since there're not too many CMAs and polices are small, it wouldn't be too terribly time consuming to recreate all this manually. It would also allow the opportunity to clean things up a bit as they are moved. What sounds the most negative with this option to me, would be re-configuring all the gateway blade settings manually.

2. Gradual upgrade using export/import - Seems easy and automated, but there's the trust factor with a script doing things for you. And I'm not clear on how it works with having two different MDS' with different IPs, and migrated CMA with new IP, regarding SIC and licensing, etc, etc

3. All in one shot migration - Same risks with scripting as gradual, but seems the IP and licensing issues go away with this option.

4. In place upgrade - Similar to #3, but likely faster?

[Vladimir]

Given your environment, I'd go with the manual re-creation of the objects and policies. Less chances that some legacy properties will make it through, good fallback environment is available, less risk and ability to gradually move CMAs.

You may want to incorporate the upgrade of the gateways to R80.10 for the CMAs you are moving to the new MDS, to avoid legacy IPS.

Just take snapshots on the gateways and dump GAIA configurations from them.

This way you can have fresh install of the R80.10 on them, restore GAIA settings, Establish SIC with new CMAs (DMS') and push newly re-created policy on them.

This may be a slower approach, but is a most predictable and it lends to fewer unknowns and complications. 

[Kaspars_Zibarts]

Why don't you upgrade export on the old box and then do upgrade import on the new keeping all IPs? Just swap the cable. Everything should work including SIC. And therefore have solid rollback by plugging cable back.

Cleanup afterwards when things are stable. That minimises risks of any overlooked issues doing manual work. 

Depends on environment and impact to business really

[Jesse]

Good points on both replies, thanks guys. I think I may run the pre-migration check this weekend and see how my database looks before I decide. If it's pretty clean, I may go ahead and export/import. I should then be able to change up things on my new P1 as desired before I move any gateways over. This may be the best of both solutions.

[Maarten_Sjouw]

my 2 cents on your 3 options:

1. a lot of work with a high error factor, forgot to tick that one box, triple checking but still missed that one thing.

2. a very usable solution if you want to move gradually and in the process want to get the feeling with the new smartconsole and the new look and feel and where all things are.

SIC is taken along, all you need to make sure of is that the license is recreated on the new management IP and the new CMA-IP is given full access to the gateways before the migration.

3. When you like big bang migrations this is one option if you also need to move to a different machine, this is the easiest way to get there.

4. When you have a good backup and the system is up for the task at hand, this is by far the easiest. Use CPUSE to do the upgrade, start the download and upgrade.

[Juan_Carlos]

If this is not urgent I would suggest option 5 : wait for R80.20 or above.

With R80.10 : 

- individual backup/restore of DMS is not supported

- DBrev does not exist

- Secondary management server with DMS as primary management server is not supported

Regarding option 4 : we had bad experience in the past when trying to upgrade MDS.