High Availability Feature: Incompatible supervisor Images?

[s.debenito]

Hi,

I have a 6500 Catalyst with 2 supervisor engines. The active supervisor is running software version 7.6.2(a), and the standby supervisor is running 7.6.3(a). I can't reload the Catalyst totally because it is in a production network, so I need to use the "High Availability" feature for upgrading the image without resetting the system. When I type the command "show system highavailability", the Catalyst says: "Status: OFF. Incompatible Supervisor Image on standby module".

Why are they incompatible? Where can I find a list of compatible software images?

Thanks in advance.

Sergio.

[tbaranski]

Take a look through http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps708/products_configuration_guide_chapter09186a00801a5b2e.html.

Among other things, it says:

"OFF (standby-supervisor-image-incompatible): The standby supervisor engine is running a different image than the active supervisor engine and it is not version compatible (the versioning option in NVRAM is enabled). No synchronization is done (even a configuration change in NVRAM on the active supervisor engine cannot be propagated to the standby supervisor engine because of the version incompatibility)."

AFAIK, you need to have the same software image on both Supervisors. (Even if you don't always "need" to, you always should.) If you reboot the standby Sup it will typically synchronize its software image with the active Sup. (I've never tried this when the standby has a newer software version, however.) Otherwise you can manually synchronize them per the above document.