Emergency Responder - upgrade from 10.5(1a) to 12.5(1)SU1 - hangs

[Bill]

I am trying to upgrade CER 10.5(1a) to version 12.5(1)SU1, but the upgrade seems to hang.

I have CER 10.5(1a) installed using OVA cer_10.5_vmv8_v1.6

Using the 20,000 phone deployment

I have applied the v3-Keys COP file.

When I try to upgrade to 12.5(1)SU1.

It goes for a few minutes and then seems to hang.

My first attempt I let it go for 8 hours.

The CPU, and Disk are idle the whole time.

The CLI status says it is still upgrading.

I have now tried 3 times and always hangs at the same place.

MD5 for the ISO check out OK.

I have attached the log.

[Maren Mahoney]

Does the I/O throttling reference here apply?

"During a software upgrade, the software installation may stall. Check the upgrade log for new messages. If the upgrade log does not have any new log messages, then the installation may have stalled.

You must cancel the upgrade, disable I/O throttling, and restart the upgrade procedure. When you successfully complete the upgrade, you do not need to enable I/O throttling again."

CER Administration Guide for Release 12.5(1)SU1 - Troubleshoot Stalled Upgrades

Maren

[Bill]

Maren

Thanks for the Reply.  I hadn't seen that note about IO throttle.

Unfortunately that did not fix the issue.

And there is mention about if it stalls at the /partb RPM deletion, but the install does not make it that far.

Probably a TAC case needed.

I have tried a couple different ways where I can make it work.

If I start with OVA 12.5 and install 10.5(1a), then I am able to go direct to 12.5(1)SU1.

I also found if I first go to 11.5(4)5000-6,  I can go to 12.5(1)SU1.

Another issue and probably another discussion - VMTools is not running in 12.5(1)SU1.

It says installed but not running.

12.5(1)SU1 looks to be running CentOS 7, but the OVA still shows RHEL6

I tried changing it, but still Not Running.

[Maren Mahoney]

I agree that it's TAC time. When I was researching for you, I did see something about CER and VMware Tools causing a problem. But I can't find it now. If you find a solution (especially if TAC tells you you've hit a bug), please let us know.

Maren

[Bill]

I did finally open a TAC case on this.

After a little back and forth with TAC re-sending me the upgrade instructions and what not, they finally said Yes, there is a bug.

It is categorized as available only to Cisco employees. 

But the TAC engineer gave me information on it.

Not sure if the forum rules allow me to post the Bug ID, since it is Cisco employee only.

But it basically says there is a bug when upgrading CER 10.5.1 to 12.5, and the work around is to first upgrade to 11.5.

Applies to 11.0 as well.

I wish it were publicly/partner available. Would have saved me a few hours of testing.

[Chris Deren]

We have seen it in the field not just with CER, but other 12.5.1SU1 upgrades when going from 10.5, base 12.5.1 is OK to upgrade to first instead of 11.5.

[Bill]

Thanks Adam

That is good information.

I played around with the hardware version but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

Same for the Guest OS version.

UCM has a ReadMe with the 12.5 OVA that gives information on hardware version and Guest OS.

The CER OVA does not.

But you’re saying follow the UCM notes.

CER is fairly easy to redeploy if you have all the data exported.

The one thing that’s always bugged me is we could not export/import Onsite Alert info.

But in 12.5 we can.

That’s a well needed feature.