Upgrade/Migration process for replacing Management Center hardware

Products

• Management Center

Issue/Introduction

Migrate or upgrade Management Center (MC) hardware or virtual appliance (VA) to another, including configuration, reports, scripts, users, etc via backup and restore.

Environment

Management Center 

Resolution

Steps to migrate or upgrade from one MC appliance to another MC appliance

Prerequisite: A backup of an MC appliance can be restored to itself, to another MC hardware appliance, or to an MC VA.  The target MC appliance must have compute resources (CPU, memory, disk size) equal to or higher resources than the original MC appliance from which the backup was created. Backups can only be restored to the same version of MC.

1. Deploy and configure the new MC appliance then wait for the RAID to sync.  For more information on the raid status, see the technical documentation reference:  'show raid'
2. Verify that the new MC appliance is running the same OS version as the Management Center you are replacing.  Review the release notes.
3. Create and export the backup on the Management Center being replaced. See the backup command in the technical documentation.
   
   • IMPORTANT: Before creating the backup on the old appliance: 
     1. Disable Statistics Monitoring collection on devices. This will ensure monitored devices are no longer sending stats to the old MC appliance avoiding data gaps in the Statistics Monitoring reports on the new MC appliance. For more information see: Activate or Deactivate Health and Statistics Monitoring on MC
     2.  Disable any scheduled jobs that may conflict with production when 2 or more MC appliances are running the same job simultaneously. For more information see MC Job Scheduling Options 
4. Import and restore the Management Center backup from the old MC appliance to the new MC appliance. For more information see:  Restore an MC Backup Configuration
5. Re-enable Statistics Monitoring collection on devices on the new MC appliance. For more information see: Activate or Deactivate Health and Statistics Monitoring on MC
6. Restore scheduled jobs previously disabled on the new Management Center.  For more information see MC Job Scheduling Options 
7. Perform sanity checks by looking around the GUI and CLI to confirm that the devices, policies, scripts, device communication, and scheduled jobs, are correct on the new MC after the restore.

Additional Information

1. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/web-and-network-security/management-center/3-3/index/c_standard_commands/c_show/c_show_raid.html
2. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/web-and-network-security/management-center/3-3/index/c_enable_commands/backup_p.html 
3. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/web-and-network-security/management-center/3-3/report_devices_wan/monitor_health/activate_deactivate_device.html
4. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/web-and-network-security/management-center/3-3/manage_jobs/add_job/Schedule.html
5. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/web-and-network-security/management-center/3-3/admin_mc/restore_mc.html