Migrating from Rainwall 3.1 SP5 cluster to ClusterXL NGX R62

[pop_alex]

Dear expert,

I would like to get some advice from you all about migrating our existing firewall cluster (which is running on RainWall 3.1 SP5) to ClusterXL NGX R62.

Currently, our firewall cluster is running on;

i. Check Point NG AI R55 HFA18
ii. Solaris 9
iii. SUN V280R c/with GigaSwift Quad card (3 unit).
iv. RainWall 3.1 SP5

Anyone can give me some advice on how to perform migration from RainWall to ClusterXL NGX (I understood that I need to perform NG AI to NGX first prior to ClusterXL NGX) with less downtime? What I should prepare during the migration?

Thank you very much !

Regards

Al

[yelwoci]

We changed 2 clusters from Rainwall 3.1 to R61 and R62.
Just remove all the Rainwall component and enable the Checkpoint Clustering.
If you're upgrading remove Rainwall first.

Even though Rainwall is more cumbersome than Cluster XL; I really liked it.
Many thanks to EMC for its discontinuation!


Y

[fdamstra]

Originally Posted by yelwoci

Even though Rainwall is more cumbersome than Cluster XL; I really liked it. Many thanks to EMC for its discontinuation!

Similarly, we're in the process of getting rid of rainwall on two clusters ourselves. I'm glad it's gone, as I hated all the finger pointing that went on whenever we had a problem with clustering.

We're actually taking advantage of the necessary downtime and are upgrading our firewalls at the same time. For one cluster (keeping existing hardware), we simply shutdown one firewall, built it up from scratch in R65/ClusterXL, and then had a brief downtime where we (a) shutdown the remaining RainWall node, and then (b) pushed policy to the active node. Downtime was less than 10 minutes, and it was only that long because we had problems with load-sharing multicast.

We're doing it again with a hardware upgrade to the second cluster, and will follow the same plan. Shutdown one node, power up the new hardware in its place and establish SIC/adjust the configuration in SmartDashboard, power down the second node and push policy.

I can't see a way to remove rainwall without at least some downtime. Possibly you could push a ClusterXL config to a machine running rainwall, but I have no idea if that would work. Best to bite the bullet, figure out when traffic is minimal, and schedule the time.