6509 hybrid to native conversion

[eclinton]

Hello everyone,

I will be converting our 6509 switches from hybrid to native mode, I have checked the Cisco doc and had a Cisco tech. check my procedures that I will be using for the convserion.

I was wondering if anyone else has done this conversion and if they could tell me about any problems they encountered so I can avoid the same situations.

Thanks

Erik,,,,,

[Prashanth Krishnappa]

Its pretty straight forward.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/81.html

However, I do have one suggestion. If you can, try to have the Native IOS image in a flash card and boot it from there the first time so that you still have hybrid images in the switch's and the MSFCs bootflash to fall back on if something goes wrong. After the conversion is succesful, you can format the sup-bootflash and TFTP the image onto it.

[nightowl2k2]

I just did this conversion earlier this summer on 2 SUP2's. I did run into some problems since I had to upgrade the flash on the MSFC to 32MB since the SUP2's that I upgraded were some of the first ones and only had 16MB of flash. Other than that I really had no problems at all. All I did is follow the Cisco documentation and everything went fine. This was also the first conversion that I have done. Also, as it was mentioned it is a good idea to have a flash card with the native IOS on it to boot from to take care of any problems that you might run into. Over all the process is pretty painless and if you follow the documentation everything should go smoothly.

[eclinton]

Thanks for your reply nightowl, I have to upgrade the ROM on one of the switches so it will support a 64 meg flash card.

How long did it take you to convert the two switches?

Erik,,,,,

[nightowl2k2]

The first one I upgraded took about 2-3 hours. The second one only took about an hour since I was familar with he process and the quirks with upgrading the flash on the MSFC. This was upgrading the code only. This did not include doing the config conversion, which was a completely different process. When you upgrade the flash on the board, if the flash is for the MSFC you will need to use the switch-console command from CatOS to get to the MSFC. Once there you need to tell it to boot to the bootloader. This allows the MSFC to be seen from the SUP in CatOS. If you do not do this you cannot proceed with the upgrade.

[bbaillie]

Caution on SUP 1/MSFC2 IOS images are larger than 16MB currently on the SUP1 card, workaround is to boot from the flash card forever more. Some copper GBICS aren't supported on some versions of IOS. If using fibre cards of the MTRJ connector type ensure you set them to 100MB Full duplex otherwise they will default to half duplex and cdp will start to show lots of duplex mismatches at the console.

Don't get bootflash: and sup-bootflash: terms confused, from the rom monitor bootflash: means the supervisor card bootflash area. When running IOS the sup-bootflash: is the supervisor card bootflash area but the bootflash: is now the MSFC bootflash area. When you are happy with the conversion remember to format the sup-bootflash before attempting to copy the new IOS to the sup-bootflash:.

[eclinton]

Thanks Brian.