Cisco ASR 9006 upgrade

[mrkasuj]

Hi Community,

Can you advise if upgrade process of ASR9006 from 5.x to 6.x is any different to the upgrade of 9001? I'm wondering especially regarding the dual RP in 9006. Is there any official pdf from Cisco for dual RP?

Thanks.

[tkarnani]

if you have upgraded an asr9001 the steps are the same. as you mentioned 5.x to 6.x, one thing you need to be aware of are the code signing changes

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ios-nx-os-software/ios-xr-software/213745-ios-xr-upgrade-changes-certificate-expi.html

the upgrade document is located under docs.tar for the target release

https://software.cisco.com/download/home/282414851/type/280805694/release/6.6.3

[mrkasuj]

Hi Tkarnani,

Thank you. When there are two RPs what happens when i will do install add and install activate - both will reload at the same time? Or only the active one will reload and system will switch to the second RP?

[tkarnani]

when you perform install add, the packages are extracted on the primary RSP disk0: and synchronized on the standby automatically

when you perform install activate, the entire router will reload and come up with the new code.

[philclemens1835]

For our upgrade, because the ASR9K handles the duplication of RSP0 to RSP1, I would pull RSP1 during the upgrade.  Once RSP0 was upgraded and the box was working as desired, I would then insert RSP1.  IOS-XR took care of things from that point forward.  It takes roughly 10-20 minutes for it to fully upgrade RSP1.  The only thing left to do at that point would be to ensure all the FPD's are upgraded.

In our case, I was able to fully upgrade and configure RSP's in the lab, and then swap them into the boxes in the field.  This kept downtime to a minimum in the production environment.

[smilstea]

You can also prevent the pain of going through install activate again (to downgrade) or install rollback, by not committing the activate package set after the install activate immediately. That way your active packages would be 6.x and your committed packages would be 5.x, then you just need to do a reload of the router and then 5.x will come back immediately. Once you are comfortable with 6.x then do the install commit.

Sam