This article will explain how to migrate to a new hardware appliance in Firepower 6.5. As with all its product lines, Cisco periodically refreshes its Firepower Hardware Appliances to ensure customers are getting the latest and greatest in performance and reliability.

Back in July 2019, Cisco issued an end-of-life notice for its last-generation Firepower Management Centre x500 appliance range. The x600 appliance range was announced as the replacement, based on its UCS C220 M5 server platforms.

Click here if you want us to perform an important end-of-life assessment for you.

However, performing a migration from one FMC to another, in the case of a hardware refresh or virtual to physical conversion, has always required manual un-registration of Firepower Threat Defense devices from the old FMC and reregistration to the new FMC platform

This can be a time and resource-consuming process, often requiring hands on-site at every location to complete the migration. The risk introduced by wiping an FTD configuration by un-registering it from the original FMC has also caused operational concerns to be raised regarding the migration process.

To resolve these issues, Cisco has introduced a new migration process in Firepower 6.5, allowing a live migration from one FMC to another without requiring manual reconfiguration of remote FTD devices.

At a high level the process has the following steps for a standalone FMC deployment:

Please note that only Cisco Certified migration paths are supported.

If you would like to see more information or further detail on the migration process including a procedure for High Availability pairs, click here.

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