MX HA pair swap out procedure

[KiloBravo]

I have a pair of MX105 appliances configured as Primary and warm-spare in my network. I need to swap them both out for exactly the same models.  I've read the MX cold swap article but that is assuming that there is only one appliance in the network already that needs replacing, which isn't the case.

Would like the communitys ideas on what the best procedure would be for this? I need to maintain the same config, it's literally just a hardware swap-out.

thanks in advance

[alemabrahao]

Clone the existing network, add the new MXes to the network, perform the necessary tests and schedule a maintenance window to change equipment.

[KiloBravo]

probably should've added this to the OP but... I've also got approximately 100 APs and around 15 switches in the same network...

[KarstenI]

You need a downtime anyhow. I would remove both devices out of the network and just add the new ones.

After that you have to reconfigure the VLAN-to-port-mapping and reenable the AutoVPN. The rest of the config is fetched from the dashboard.

[CptnCrnch]

Are you possibly overthinking this? Why not swap out one after the other?

Perhaps I'm not seeing the issue...

[alemabrahao]

Because you can perform some tests before migrate to a new MX. It's just a suggestion to reduce downtime.

[KiloBravo]

Overthinking and me tend to come as a package 😄.

But no, honestly, it's just to make sure I've not missed anything obvious. my time dpeloying meraki solutions is intermittent and it's been a while so I don't want to get caught out because I'd forgotten something I once knew. Always feel a little sketchy when it's been a while and I've been bitten before by the cloud-managed only thing in the past .

[Ryan_Miles · Accepted solution]

• Claim the new MX serials into your org
• Disable HA which removes the spare from the network
• Enable HA and select the new spare serial
• Bring it online, let if update config and firmware and settle
• Force HA switchover from primary to spare using the swap button
• Disable HA again which would remove the old primary serial from the network
• Enable HA and choose the serial for what will be the new primary MX
• Bring it online, let if update config and firmware and settle
• Last, force HA swap again

Enabling HA does cause a soft reset on both MXs and will interrupt traffic. So, you'll still want to do this all in a maintenance window. 

[KiloBravo]

Thanks for the clear steps Ryan.

I guess using this method there's no need to locally/manually configure anything on the boxes before slotting them in either?

[Ryan_Miles]

If they have static WAN IPs you'll need to account for that with a local status page config (unless it can get DHCP from the subnet then be changed to statics).