Does reverting to a past CUCM image protect database / config changes?

[Kenneth Salhoff]

Doing a post-mortem on a CUCM migration gone bad....

Customer was running CUCM 6.1.3 and wanted to go to 7.0.2.  The partner knew that this was not a supported upgrade path, but this was prior to 7.1 FCS and the customer was eager to move forward (and didn't care about losing 6.1.3 specific features).  CUCM 6.1.2 was on the inactive partition on the CUCM server.

The partner came up with the idea that he would revert the CUCM servers to 6.1.2 and do the upgrade from there.  What happened was that, although the migration worked, all of the configuration / db changes made to the system since the upgrade to 6.1.3 were lost (and the customer was unhappy)

It 'APPEARS' that when you revert a system to a previous version, the database from the current system is not copied back to the previous system image.  Of course this make perfect sense (in hindsight) because there are likely to be db schema changes between versions that would be difficult to deal with during reversion.

My question is:  Is this documented anywhere?  Do we have a document I can give to the partner that details what exacty is preserved or what the caveats are to watch out for when reverting to an old version of CUCM (in the appliance model)?  This does not appear to be covered in the install/upgrade docs.

Thanks for any help.

Ken

[bgrunewald]

On page 8-9 of the UCM 7.x SRND, there are notes about how updates are handled during an upgrade. Reverting to the old version is not explicitly covered, but the implication is that no updates will be performed on the inactive version.

My understanding of the upgrade process is:

1) When you put a new version on the inactive partition, it migrates the current configuration DB to the new version.

2) You activate the new version and see how things work.

3) If new version works OK, stay with it. If new version is a flop, revert.

When you making configuration changes to the active version, the inactive version is not touched.

I have not heard of "downgrading" the database on any UCM version, so this is not a new restriction.

Sounds like the customer made a poor decision, based on a misunderstanding of how the product works.

[PATRICK ALAND]

Ken,

The warning is there in the upgrading 4.x to 7.x guide at:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/upgrade/7_1_2/upgrd712.html#wp44934

But I don't see it in the 5/6 to 7 guide although I know it was stressed heavily in the Networkers session on UCM 4/5/6 to 7 upgrades