9800-L-C in HA Rommon and Ethernet Phy Upgrade

[Gehrig_W]

Hello Cisco WLAN Experts,

I was asked to upgrade the ROMMON and Ethernet Phy  Firmware of our malworking 9800-L-C-HA für WLAN Guests.

Background: Our 9800-L-C gets stuck from time to time and stops packet forwarding on 2.5Gbps-Interfaces

Ticket is open and we have carried out several remediations on this box running with around 4000 users.

The latest Release Notes on Upgrading Field Programmable on 9800 show a solved caveat regarding packet drop on the 2.5Gbps-Interface, which we would like to solve with this upgrade.

9800L: MAC congested @Low PPS, drops/TX_XOFF in Bay 0-Tune settings and pause frames in mgig ports
CSCvq48018  

Therefore I would like to know the right procedure to upgrade two of 9800-L-C in HA-Mode.

The guide for this is rather confusing:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/9800/config-guide/b_upgrade_fpga_c9800.html#id_132283

My questions:

In which order and which steps do I need to upgrade the two boxes ?

1. ROMMON

upgrade rom-monitor filename bootflash:C9800-L-rommon.1612-3r.pkg chassis active r0

Shall I follow this command with a "Reload" or a "redundancy force-switchover" to carry out same command on the second box ?

2. Ethernet-Phy Firmware Upgrade

upgrade hw-programmable phy filename bootflash:C9800-L-hw-programmables.17.11.01.pkg

Shall I follow this command with a "Reload" or a "redundancy force-switchover" to carry out same command on the second box ?

The Guide is only describing a ROMMON-Upgrade of a HA-Setup on the last page, but not the Ethernet-Phy-Upgrade

for  a HA-setup !

Who can give some good advise how to carry out the upgrade in correct order and sequence for both acitve and standby unit ?

Thank You in advance

Wini

[Gehrig_W]

Hello

I would like to inform You that the ROMMON and Ethernet PHY upgrade went through without any disturbance on our 9800-L-C Guest WLC according to proposal from Rich R.  Here is the full cooking recipe without breaking HA and WLAN client disconnects:

Thank You Rich R, Leo Laohoo and marce1000 for Your good hints and assistance.

I asked TAC also to update the Install guide regarding "Breaking HA first" which is not necessary

Kind regards

Wini

[Rich R]

Excellent - thanks for sharing. 
Hopefully this resolves your original problem.

[NickyJKernow]

Hi,

Did this ever help resolve the original issue you had?

[Gehrig_W]

Hello Nick,

no, unfortunately this didn't help to resolve our main issue. The bug solved with this is CSCvq48018 instead.

one major problem on the 9800-L was not working autonegotaion on the physical Twin-Gig-Ports.

In our case the box is connected to an HP-switch and autonegotion did not work using LLDP.

The 9800-L worked with 2,5Gbps, while the HP-Switch communicated on 1Gbps using autonegotiation. This caused packet loss and DHCP-problems durign peak times. We changed to "speed 1000" and "duplex full" on both sides and "no autonegotation auto" on the 9800-L to get rid of the DHCP-problems.

Kind regards

Wini