Unity Connection Upgrade Version Switch - Grab a Coffee

[Dominic Zeni]

Thought I would post some reassurance for anyone upgrading Unity Connection to 8.5.  I can't remember other Unity Connection upgrades taking so long on the version switch (utils system switch-version).  In my case I was upgrading a Unity Connection cluster from 7.1(3b) to 8.5(1)SU1.  The software installation to the inactive partition took approximately two hours (per server), which is what the documentation describes you should expect during a business hours upgrade.  What the documentation didn't say was that during the version switch you could expect ~45 minutes of no network response from the server.  Anyway, hopefully someone will read this, grab a coffee, and wait (instead of sending out rollback notifications - - as I did!).

HTH

Dom

[Tommer Catlin]

What size server did you have and how many users in the database?  usually if you have an older 78xx series server and a few users (1000's) it can take awhile.   Even on CUCMs with 7825/35s it quite painful to upgrade to any version.     

[Dominic Zeni]

I'm not sure on the specific part number, but it was a 7835 IBM server.  We had just about 1000 users.  The upgrade went well, no issues, I was just a little surprised at the time it took to move the database!  Now I know..

[maratimer_2]

Thanks for this post, it was very helpful.  After switching the publisher version, I started to worry after about 30 minutes of inactivity what was going on.  Using a 7845I3 with approximately 1400 users took approximately over an hour before EACH node came back online upgrading from 8.x SU1 to SU4.  This is our smallest of 10 clusters, with others having up to 10,000 users per cluster.  Definitely not looking forward to upgrading those down the road.

Im glad I saw this post as I was beginning to worry I would not meet my change window, and was ready to roll back.  Everything came up fine, but definitely took a few extended coffee breaks.

[Rob Huffman]

Just wanted to make sure you had seen this

If you are upgrading during nonbusiness hours: On the publisher server, run the CLI command utils iothrottle disable to speed up the upgrade.

In an effort to prevent upgrades from adversely affecting system  performance during business hours, the upgrade process is throttled and  may take several hours to complete. If you are upgrading during a  maintenance window, you can speed up the upgrade by disabling the  throttling. This decreases the time required for the upgrade to complete  but adversely affects Connection performance.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/8x/upgrade/guide/8xcucrug009.html#wp1056720

Cheers!

Rob

"Your life is worth much more than gold." 

- Bob Marley

[maratimer_2]

Yes, I was prepared and used the utils iothrottle disable as documented.  The actual upgrade only took less than 2 hours per server including downloading the files, which was what I epxected from reading the documentation.  It was the "swtich version' step which took alot longer than expected.

Thanks for your input, its valuable to others reading as well!