Upgrading Nortel Switches

[JTBarnzy]

Hello.

My company is about to start an upgrade of about 200 BayStack 470's to 5510 and 5520's.

I realize that the 470's are layer 2 switches and the 5500's are layer 3 but I was wondering if there is a way to make the 470 config work on the 5500's to simplify this upgrade?

Thank you

 

[anthonyanderberg]

The 470s and 5500s are different product families so the config files won't work directly. I've never heard of any config migration tools, although there are smarter people on this list that might have ideas.

How complicated are your configurations? If all of the switches are similar you could load a 'base' config (or perhaps one of a set of base configs) and then write a macro or script to change things like IP addresses and description fields... that's what I've done when upgrading hundreds of switches at a time.

I can imagine writing a script to get parameters off of one switch and enter them in another, but it would get very messy as the config complexity increased.

 

[Alainv]

They are both stack products and a lot of the commands are the same for both product lines.
The only difference is when you upgrade from a 470-24 towards a 5510-24.
With the former you have 26 usable ports, with the latter only 24 fixed.
So there you need some tuning.

And it depends what kind of soft you are running on the 470's.
You need to be able to run the show run command!
if the ascii upload won't work, you can always copy past it.
Certainly partially.
Therefore the former tip, build a standard config is usefull.
Once you have done it, use a binairy config file to upload towards the 'new' switches, since a binairy config does not change the existing ip addresses.
Then just copy/past the vlan info and common configuration parameters.