Expressway Cluster Upgrade Guidance

[sean Riley]

I am preparing to upgrade my Cisco Expressway Cluster from v 8.10.4 to 8.11.2.  The cluster consists of 2x C's and 2x E's.

I have read through the documentation for upgrading a cluster and it states to upgrade the primary peer first, then upgrade subordinate peers one at a time.

My question is can I upgrade my primary C and primary E while the subordinate C and E are still handling calls.  Then after the primary's are up, proceed with upgrading the subordinate's while the primary's handle calls?

Or do I need to upgrade the Primary C or E followed by the Subordinate C or E? 

Thanks.

[R0g22]

Yes you can do that. Recommendation is always to do this when there is minimum traffic and/or after hours. Once you put the node(s) into maintenance, ensure registrations and calls clear up before upgrading. If they do not, manually release them. Incoming calls won't be processed once the node is in maintenance but existing calls will drop only if the node is restarted. Rest the peers in the cluster continue to process the calls.

[Adam Pawlowski]

Note the behavior for MRA in maintenance in that since the phone or jabber is effective registered through the E, it won’t figure out maintenance immediately and you’ll have a period where calls will fail to progress.

Youll also see alarms about the cluster that take a bit to clear while things reconverge but this is normal. 

I ran ran into an issue with 8.10.4 using per domain DNS for MRA, where on one cluster upgrading to X8.11 broke this, which I could reproduce- didn’t affect another. Needed to reconfigure this feature for it to work properly .

[sean Riley]

Thanks for the prompt replies to my question.  My upgrade seemed to go fine.  I upgraded my primary C and primary E after placing them into Maint Mode.  After they completed the upgrade and rebooted I verified the upgrade.  I then put my subordinate C and E into Maint Mode and upgraded.  After they completed the upgrade and rebooted I verified the upgrade and that replication was good and that all Alarms had cleared.

Something that I have noticed since the upgrade that I hope you can help explain.  Before the upgrade I could put one C into maint mode and the phones would register with the up C.  I would verify no calls were active and put one E into maint mode.  Calls flow could proceed without issue.  It seems now that when I put one of my E's into maint mode, all phones unregister.  Doesn't seem this should be happening.  Any thoughts on why this would happen?