MS Firmware Patching

[lewphillz]

Hey everyone,

Looking for some advice. We have 100+ sites running Meraki MS switches, all bound to device templates. When we apply firmware updates, all switches in a network reboot at the same time, which causes user impact.

I was hoping there was a way to stagger or stage the reboots to reduce disruption, but so far I haven’t found a good solution.

Has anyone dealt with this at scale or found any practical workarounds?

Appreciate any real-world experience or advice 🙏

[Rasmus Hoffmann Birkelund]

Usually you can use staged upgrade on Meraki switches where you can define groups and stages in which your switches upgrade. This us dependent on the network, since each network may contain different amount of switches and a unique network topology.

When a network is bound to a Template, you no longer have that control, since you can not guarentee the topology is the same, and that the amount of switches in the network is the same.

So unfortunately it is not possible to delay switch upgrades. Once you've scheduled it on the Template, all networks bound to said Template will adhere to that.

However, I think that you can define the time that a network should upgrade. So if you schedule an upgrade at e.g. 2 AM, the network switches will upgrade at that time according to the configured network timezone, since it is a rolling upgrade.

But like I said, I think it is like that for Templates. At the time of writing, I can't exactly remember it.

[redsector]

You can put each switch or a couple of switches into an group. And then you can upgrade group by group. You can also set times when to upgrade to each group.