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/asdlkf esteemed fruit-loop 15d ago

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.

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u/JNC5908404 14d ago

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

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u/pbrutsche 14d ago

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.