Upgrading IOMs manually

[mdrudge]

We have some UCSM 6332-16UP domains with 2304 IOMs that need Infrastructure fimware updates.  We usually use autoinstall from Central, but this last round we had issues and ran into a bug that cannot be resolved until after our next firmware upgrades.  It appears that when the update was pushed to the Subordinate FI side and rebooted, the image was also pushed to the backup image of the IOMs on the Primary FI side, which caused a brief issue.  I am thinking we should now update using manual install, so we can be sure that nothing is trying to affect the Primary FI IOMs until we are sure all the Subordinate FI IOMs are updated and running (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/ucs-manager/GUI-User-Guides/Firmware-Mgmt/4-3/b_UCSM_GUI_Firmware_Management_Guide_4-3/b_UCSM_GUI_Firmware_Management_Guide_chapter_011.html#concept_syg_5ms_zdb).  Is my understanding correct?  I don't want to find that we went through the effort of manual install, to find that UCSM upgrades pushes the update to all IOMs anyway (even though it's not activated yet).  I hope this makes sense?  Thanks!

[Riaan van Niekerk · Accepted solution]

Whith Auto-install (from Central or UCSM), it will bulk upgrade all IOMs (A and B) at the same time, with IOMs sitting in an activation state of "pending next reboot". 

With manual upgrade, you specify individually which IOMs you want to upgrade (GUI or CLI), so your suggested approach should work.

Out of interest, do you have the bug ID? We have seen numerous issues with IOMs in the 4.2(3) series of firmware, from IOM images not pushed to standalone FIs when upgrading via Central (which is why we completely switched back to locally upgrading via UCSM), to IOMs not auto-updating properly (going into an auto-update loop). 

[mdrudge]

Hi Riaan, thanks for your response.  That answers my question.  And to answer your question, the bug was this guy here: https://bst.cloudapps.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCwf25608 .  We were able to upgrade successfully, just during the upgrade process lost all connectivity to some of our chassis for a short time.  The servers running on there were not too happy about that, if you can imagine.  So unfortunately, we weren't able to upgrade without an outage, and have two more domains to upgrade and can't afford any more of these outages, which is complicating things this round.  I'm just trying to mitigate the effects as much as possible.  Thanks so much for your help!