Cisco ACE 4710 Upgrade path.

[ahamadfaiz]

Hi All,

We are using a Cisco ACE 4710 in the network. It is currently running software version A3(2.0).

We are planning an upgarde and I was in fact going through the release notes.

I wanted to know if I can directly upgrade from version A3(2.0) --> A5(2.0) or do I need to upgrade to an intermediate version before going for A5(2.0). For example like, A3(2.0) --> A4(1.0) / A4 (2.0) --> A5(2.0).

I have gone through the upgrade/downgrade guides, and I understand there must not be any issues. However, wanted to know if any of you faced any issues during the upgrade.

Thank you in advance.

Faiz

[sivaksiv]

Hi,

If you are running redundancy then take a look at the link below, rest should be fine.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/app_ntwk_services/data_center_app_services/ace_appliances/vA5_2_x/release/note/ACE_app_rn_A52x.html#wp684757

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HTH,

Siva

[ahamadfaiz]

Thank you Siva,

I do have the ACE opreating in redundancy. I guess there should not be any issue unless we keep them in different software versions; which we are not going to do.

Rest everything seems to be fine.

Regards

Faiz

[ahamadfaiz]

Hi All,

I did the upgrade and it did happen smoothly. You can directly upgrade from A3(2.0) to A5(2.0) without any issues.

However, there was a problem when I tried to failover from the Active to Standby during the upgrade. I upgraded the ACE-2 (secondary) first and it got upgraded and came up with status STANDBY_WARM.

Then I tried to perform a graceful failover of all contexts from ACE-1 to ACE-2 by entering the ft switchover all command. But it falied with the error "ft switchover command ignored for ft groups with the following IDs:...".

I suspected it could be an issue with the priorities and changed the priority of the peers, but it did not work. However, I completed the upgrade by directly running the reload command on ACE-1 without failing over to ACE-2. Then both the ACEs got upgraded with ACE-1 showing ACTIVE and ACE-2 showing STANDBY_HOT.

To figure out what the issue is, I then tried to failover just one group, but it gave me error "Preempt flag is set. ft switchover command will be ignored". I disabled preempt with the command no preempt for just one group and after that failover worked well. I disabled preempt for all the groups and successfully executed the command ft switchover all to failover all the contexts from ACE-1 to ACE-2.

It appears that to force a failover using ft switchover command we need to disable preemption.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks
Faiz