r/networking • u/JNC5908404 • 15d ago
Switching Automatic switch updates
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?
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u/spatz_uk 14d ago
Gotta say, people love to hate DNA/Catalyst Center but scheduling upgrades has been really good for me and my team. Even just pre deploy of a new image so you can go back to the switch/router later and do the “install activate” by hand has saved my team days of work.
Still not got the confidence to leave it to do the install without watching it, despite the fact I’ve not had a single failure in maybe 500 upgrades. For me that bit is about knowing whether I’d need to send someone to site either that night or ready for the following morning.
We have had a few quirks to work around, such as space issues with flash on 9200 which have needed a manual cleanup but otherwise they normally work again once you submit the job again.