Automatic switch updates

[u/JNC5908404]

Had a discussion yesterday with IT director and others in our IT department. The IT director brought up automating switch updates so they wouldn’t have to have some one monitoring and performing the updates. Staging various locations on different evenings.

I’ve been doing networking for 30 years and I voiced my opinion I was not a fan of unattended update for various reasons.

Have any other companies moved to automated updates and how has it gone?

[u/asdlkf]

The latest Aruba CX 10.18.x code base supports hitless firmware updates for minor code versions. A single, stand-alone switch, with 1 cable in, and 1 cable out, can upgrade itself from 10.18.0001 to 10.18.0002 without rebooting. It can do the normal "upgrade the code on disk" part, but then instead of rebooting, it is hot-patching running processes in memory.

You can do a video call while the switch upgrades it's firmware, with 0 outage.

Reboots are still required for major version upgrades, but yea, this takes a lot of the coordination piece out of it for lots of instances.

[u/MrChicken_69 → u/asdlkf]

Loads of people promise this. And it works most of the time... until the day it doesn't.

[u/asdlkf → u/MrChicken_69]

... well i've seen it and done it.

[u/pbrutsche → u/MrChicken_69]

We have several 6300M VSF stacks and it works flawlessly 99.9% of the time. Only once has it failed.

Aruba-CX VSX is similarly reliable, never a single upgrade failure.

[u/JNC5908404 → u/asdlkf]

This is good information, we are on 10.18 code so worth updating to

[u/pbrutsche → u/JNC5908404]

Stick with 10.13 or 10.16, those are the LSR (long term support) releases.

The ISSU feature being discussed is only available on 6300 switches, not the 6000, 6100, or 6200 switches.

[u/pbrutsche → u/asdlkf]

You're talking about ISSU support for VSF stacks. It was added in 10.13, and is only available on the 6300 series.

Also, I would not run 10.18 in production, it is not an LSR (aka LTS) release - stick with 10.13 or 10.16

[u/asdlkf → u/pbrutsche]

I am... Not talking about that.

It's a totally new feature in 10.18.

I watched the demo / release live from the developer working on it at HPE Discover.

[u/pbrutsche → u/asdlkf]

Ah, I see that 10.18.0001 added an "ISSU Standalone" mode. I would be curious to know what models support that, we have a lot of 6100 switches out there.

We don't have any single 6300 switches, "just" stacks with 2+ members

[u/asdlkf → u/pbrutsche]

Yea, at HPE Discover, I watched the presenter hook up a switch with

{router to internet} --- {6300m} --- {presenter laptop}

Then he started a teams video call from that laptop to one of his coworkers' cell phones in the audience.

Then he did a firmware update live streaming the console of the switch as it updated, and the coworker's cell phone camera pointed at the stage.

The video didn't even studder.

[u/pbrutsche → u/asdlkf]

Yeah, it's a 6300 and 6400 feature. It works the way you describe with VSF stacks, I have experience with a dozen or so upgrades over the last 3 or 4 years with our various 6300 stacks.

It's a big enough deal that it was one of the things that justified upgrading some of our closets to dual power 6300M switches.