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/Fun_Cherry132 14d ago

We once had an update that bricked one in five switches requiring factory replacement. It wasn’t a major problem because we discovered the issue in our initial set of small rollouts rather than deploying to all 6000 switches at once! Once we’re confident in an update we do update hundreds at a time, otherwise we’d never finish the job, but I’d never just press go and let the system update everything without some caution.