ISR4331, any possibility to speed up reload/reboot?

[Andreas Wittemann]

Hi guys,

is there any possibility to speed up the reboot process of the newer ISRs?

I have to admit it´s severely pissing me off to see an ISR taking 356 seconds according to its own syslog for a reload, given a BLANK configuration.

The beloved "reload warm" of the older IOS models seems to be not available anymore...can someone give me any hint if there exist other options for that?

Not that i would have to reload routers constantly, since they are very stable, point is:

It takes aaaaaages....

Any input appreciated

Cheerz

Andreas

[balaji.bandi]

In Genral -  its like any other OS has process to bring up the all services back online by checkoing the modules self checking before router come up online

6min reboot what you expect - depends on again modules installed.

I have to admit it´s severely pissing me off to see an ISR taking 356 seconds according to its own syslog for a reload, given a BLANK configuration

Only thing i am not able to understand was not clear is ( BLANK config ?)  you mean new device no config taking long time to (6min to boot) ?

[Andreas Wittemann]

exactly that. not only blank, "wr erase", reloaded, saved, "wr"...it doesn´t get more blank^^

A blank config, but written in nvram. Honestly, i see that since years and it´s annoying me, but today so obviously again while configuring 4 of these guys.

Fun fact:

There are NO modules or anything in the slots, see here:

cisco ISR4331/K9 (1RU) processor with 1795991K/6147K bytes of memory.
Processor board ID <HEREMYSERIAL>
3 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
32768K bytes of non-volatile configuration memory.
4194304K bytes of physical memory.
3207167K bytes of flash memory at bootflash:.
0K bytes of WebUI ODM Files at webui:.

Configuration register is 0x2102

It´s no **bleep**box, but looking back to the old ISRs i had warm reload times of lesser than 100s, even with modules. Therefore it´s imo a shame that the booting is meanwhile taking such a long time...

[Leo Laohoo]

All Cisco appliances will take, approximately 5 minutes (sometimes it takes even longer for switches due to microcode upgrade).

[Andreas Wittemann]

Not essentially. Since the warm reload feature was available i used it almost on every device i could, drastically reduces boot time, since you skip the loading and unpacking of the IOS in the RAM of your router. depending on the platform this can take quite long.

Not sure how long you work with Cisco devices, or maybe you just have never used it.

But it´s not available on the newer platforms anymore, this was the reason i asked for alternatives or other possibilities.

As mentioned, i´m really pleased with the new routers, but this annoys me since quite a while,

so i thought NOW i will ask in the community if someone knows about that...

[Giuseppe Larosa · Accepted solution]

Hello @Andreas Wittemann ,

new routers and switches run IOS XE and not IOS. But IOS XE is actually executed as an application on top of a linux kernel.

This should explain the longer boot times of newer platforms and probably also why the warm reload feature is not available anymore.

By the way, @Leo Laohoo is probably the most active member of the CSC  with more then 44,000 posts, so you make me laugh when you say

>> Not sure how long you work with Cisco devices, or maybe you just have never used it.

Hope to help

Giuseppe

[Leo Laohoo · Accepted solution]

or maybe you just have never used it.

Not a helpful comment but I'll bite.  

There is an American policy that network equipment must boot up in five minutes or less (six minutes is "tolerated").  

Several years ago, Cisco was caught up in a report that some three-letter security agency would "inject" codes into Cisco's firmware and then load it into target appliances (to boot). 
Cisco responded by creating a step which includes "signature verification" during the boot-up.  

If you console into the router during bootup it is there.  You'll only see the lines "signature verification" process and staring at you for a good two minutes.  

For a router to boot in 5 minutes, with config, is already good.  Have a look at CSCvq53573 or CSCvj98418.

[Andreas Wittemann]

ok, maybe u got my "not helpful comment" wrong, i didn´t want to insult you, if you understood it like this, pardon

Still there would be the possibility you never used a certain feature, regardless you are CCIE whateverandsoon, but i think you exactly understand what i am talking about. after more than 20 years working with cisco devices i learned that whoever tells me he knows all the commands and parameters IOS offers is simply telling crap.

But thanks for THAT input, i wasn´t aware of such a policy as a (possible) reason for this. But yes, sure i see that, everytime i see them booting up with console connected. And it´s exactly one reason why i liked the warm reboot so much, because you skip that step then.

BTW, love the "some three-letter security agency", good laugh on the morning.

Anyways, i abandon all hope now with what i tried to achieve, have a good day, thank you, and...no offense

@Giuseppe Larosa sure i saw that, we wear all our badges here! But see what i wrote above, and in my opinion absolutely nothing wrong with supposing someone didn´t use that before. there´s lots of stuff i roughly know about, but never used by myself

[Leo Laohoo]

Don't worry about it. 
No offense taken.  

[Joseph W. Doherty]

I was aware of the soft/warm reload command.  I've never used it in production, although I've tried it on the lab.  I wasn't aware that it was no longer available, but Giuseppe's supposition makes the most sense, that it doesn't work under IOS-XE because it's no longer a monolithic OS.  It did "reload" much faster.

Andreas, in a later post you mentioned it's faster because it doesn't need to load and unpack the IOS.  Both true, I recall (?).  Further, I recall it skips some of the cold load up POST and configuration/initiation of hardware too.

I also recall (?) it had some limit to the number of times it could be used before you had to do a "regular" reload.

BTW, IOS load keep getting longer and longer as the IOS continues to grow.

Something you might try, to decrease your reload time, I recall (?) IOS allowed itself to be unpacked, and stored in flash (in the unpacked format).  This avoided the need for the loader to unpack the IOS during a reload.

Don't know if it applied to ISR 4K series, but I know some devices (ASRs, I recall) support a package (modular) version of their IOS.  This, mainly, to allow updating components w/o the need to update the whole IOS.  I don't know if using such a version impacts reload times differently.  If they do, and one reloads faster, something else to consider.

[Leo Laohoo]

---

@Joseph W. Doherty wrote:

I know some devices (ASRs, I recall) support a package (modular) version of their IOS.

---

Good point from @Joseph W. Doherty:  Install Mode vs Bundle Mode.  

Depending on the CPU of the appliance running.  Cisco has been rolling out multi-core routers and switches.  Their IOS are called "IOS-XE" and they can be loaded either in Bundle Mode (packed) or Install Mode (unpacked).  If the appliance is booting the firmware in Bundle Mode, add an additional 1 to 2 minutes because the appliance will "need" to unpack the firmware in NVRAM every time the router is rebooted/reloaded. 

And now here are (plural) the rub: 

• Different firmware have different commands to unpack the firmware.   For example, Catalyst 3k IOS-XE version 3.X.X and 16.X.X are different commands.  
• Different model of appliances, whether it is a router or any model of the new Catalyst 3K or 9k switches, have different commands to unpack.   For example, Catalyst 9200/9200L have different command to, say Catalyst 9300.  Catalyst 9500 "vanilla" has different command to unpack with Catalyst 9500 "high performance".  There are also MORE command to unpack additional files with 9500 (vanilla/high-performance) when the appliance is running 17.X.X.  

[Andreas Wittemann]

As mentioned, i used it almost always, and encountered never any Problems with it. Really NEVER, so i was very pleased with that feature, therefore i miss it on XE.

What you mentionad as limitation was not really a limitation, it was more a variable you could define how many warm reloads the box could do before it finally have to do a cold boot. Since the maximum was 50, and i usually configured 4 while never running in that limit, no real limit at all. Plus, you could define in the same line the uptime in between.

Have a look in the IOS museum:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/sys-image-mgmt/configuration/15-s/sysimgmgmt-15-s-book/sysimgmgmt-wrm-rld.html#GUID-B1E5AB99-FC1A-4B7A-95AD-AEEDB094A47B