6509(HA) & FWSM(active/standy) system upgrade

[ahmed.gadi]

Dear All,

           I have 2 6509 chasis with one SUP720-3B in each and current IOS is s72033-ipservicesk9_wan-mz.122-18.SXF4 and 2 FWSM with version is 3.3.1

I need to upgrade FWSM system software to 4.1, after checking FWSM 4.1 release notes, I thought of upgrading IOS to latest version  to 12.2(33)SXJ.

I got new 2 CF of 512MB and downloaded the new IOS on them and need to upgrade 6509 IOS first to meet the requirement for FWSM upgrade.

Can someone suggest me the best solution to proceed with IOS as well as system upgrade with minimal downtime ?

Look forward to hearing positively.

Thanks & Regards

Ahmed...

[Harish Balakrishnan]

Hello Ahmed,

What I usually follow is to do an upgrade on the secondary switch ( hope you have full redundancy) as follows

Before upgrade: copy the new image to bootflash and verify it, once verified set the bootvar to new IOS and keep the old IOS as secondary

During upgrade: Make the device down and put the memory into the SUP

power on the device and monitor the console messages

We let the device running on 1 week time to make sure that there are no bugs/unexpected things before upgrading the primary one

regards

Harish.

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