RSP-880 (32-bit) to RSP5 (64-bit) upgrade

[Stephen Craven]

Is there a guide to upgrading between the RSP-880 and RSP5 line cards?

We are preparing to bring the chassis completely down and install the RSP5s and then copy the config over but I'm concerned about differences in the configs between the two OSes. I know some of the show commands are different.

UPDATE -- Right after I posted this, I discovered a resource:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/asr9000/migration/guide/b-migration-to-ios-xr-64-bit/b-migration-to-ios-xr-64-bit_chapter_011.html

We are currently running the 32-bit OS on our RSP880s. Is the preferred upgrade path to upgrade the RSP880s to the 64-bit OS and then swap the cards to the RSP5s?

[smilstea · Accepted solution]

You can upgrade to 64-bits but I don't see a need to, all you really need to do is iPXE boot the RSP5s (if not running any OS yet), install the optional packages (for 64-bit) and then in config mode 'load' the config from usb or copy the file to the router and apply it. You shouldn't have a problem migrating the config from 32-bit to 64-bit, very few commands were changed, if for some reason something doesn't apply the commit will fail and you can check 'show config failed' to see why, verify you have all the packages needed installed, try commit best-effort to apply everything that didn't fail and then figure out why something failed. But again I don't think you will run into an issue so long as you have installed the right packages.

Sam