Upgrade ACI Leaf/Spine Switch without APIC

[bill.greenwood]

Looking for the process to upgrade ACI mode Switches (leafs or spine) without an APIC.  Client is adding switches to an existing environment and wants us to stage the switches in our facility.  I found the following: https://community.cisco.com/t5/data-center-documents/totd-how-do-you-perform-a-firmware-upgrade-on-spine-switches/ta-p/3162792 but it is a couple of years old and I am hoping for a current process to upgrade the switches including the BIOS if necessary.

Thanks,

Bill

[Nik Noltenius]

Hi Bill,
I believe the link you found is still valid. We just used the same procedure for upgrades in a 3.2 environment. To my knowledge there is no newer / better way.
Kind regards,
Nik

[Ahmet Mustafa Mungan]

Hi,

In document, he says that "/bin/check-fpga.sh FpGaDoWnGrAdE" command upgrades both FPGAs and BIOS. However, when I use the command in 14.2.2f version, it only upgrades FPGAs. Is there another command to upgrade BIOS?

Kind Regards. 

[Sergiu.Daniluk]

Hi @Ahmet Mustafa Mungan 

The easiest way to solve FPGA/BIOS mismatch, is to downgrade the leaf/spine to a previous minor or maintenance release and upgrade it back.

Example: downgrade to 4.2(2e) and upgrade back to 4.2(2f).

Regards,

Sergiu

[Ahmet Mustafa Mungan]

Sergiu,

Firstly, thank you for your answer. I know that I can do it with downgrade-upgrade. However, it means that everytime when we add a linecard to spine, we have to do downgrade-upgrade process for spine switch. Is there any easier way to do the BIOS upgrade like FPGA upgrade (via "/bin/check-fpga.sh FpGaDoWnGrAdE" command).

Regards,

Ahmet

[Sergiu.Daniluk]

Hi @Ahmet Mustafa Mungan 

Realistically speaking, there are not that many situations, when new LC are added to a spine:

• it's either a hardware failure (which hopefully is not happening every month ^_^ )
• an expansion of your fabric
• change of linecard with newer model

All of this situations, are not that often, right? Plus, you have at least 2 spines in your fabric, which means, you can perform the downgrade/upgrade process without impact in your network.

If you add a new leaf, well, it is easier to load directly for the first time an earlier version, and after you add it to the fabric you just perform the upgrade.

Regarding /bin/check-fpga.sh script, this is used for FPGA upgrade only. See a snip of the script below:

if [ $IS_TOR -eq 1 ]; then
    echo "Upgrading FGPAs for TOR $card_index"
    vsh -c "install epld bootflash:///epld.gimg module 1"
else
    echo "Upgrading FPGAs for $card_index"
    vsh -c "install epld bootflash:///epld.gimg module all"
fi

This is the command used inside the script.

Regards,

Sergiu

[Ahmet Mustafa Mungan]

Sergiu,

Thank you for all the information. It seems that we have to downgrade and upgrade the switch then. We had opened a TAC case in parallel. Tac engineer said that there are two options for upgrading BIOS. Via Root Access (that only TAC engineers could do) or downgrade/upgrade. He also said that; "After checking internally, it seems that recommended action is downgrade/upgrade to prevent any other problems."

Kind Regards,

Ahmet Mustafa Mungan