How should I step from 5.5r5 to 6.2r5?

[Seeker_]

Hey Guys,

I've got two SA-6000 in an Active-Passive cluster running 5.5r5 and I want to take them to 6.2r5.

What's the recommended path?

Thanks,

[muttbarker_]

According to the release notes you are ok to go from your current release to 6.2x or 6.3x. Obviously it would be best to do a full backup of the System and User configs @ the 5.5x level so that in event of a problem you could rollback to 5.5 and drop the old configs back on.

[Seeker_]

Hey Kevin,

This is my first upgrade and I didn't know where to look.

I've found in the 6.2 GA release notes where automatic upgrades from 5.5 R5.1 Build 12781are supported but not the 5.5 R5 Build 12491 that I'm at.

So my next question is, if I have to "step up" does it make more sense to go to the 5.5 R7 Build13237 (that is supported) and then up to 6.2 R5 Build 14085 or would you suggest a different path?

Thanks again, for your help!

Craig

[muttbarker_]

Hey Craig - I always err on the side of caution. I personally would take the two step approach, or contact Juniper to find out why the specific 12491 build is not supported. But, by the time you open a case, log everything and wait for a callback you probably could have completed the double upgrade on both boxes.

[Seeker_]

Yeahhh... I agree.

Thanks again.

[SOCKMD_]

We recently performed an uprade similar to the one you are asking about, from 5.5 to 6.2.

I studied the release notes and took a path that was recommended here. As a precaution, I also asked Juniper support what they recommended by opening a support case, and they said I was perfectly fine.

However, we ran into som pretty serious bugs after the upgrade, the worst one being authentication servers disappearing when we would create new ones, due to an errornous database pointer after the upgrade. Took JTAC a few months to finally get it fixed, and we still can't update our ESAP files before we do yet another upgrade.

What really got me going in all this, was that one of their engineers mentioned that it wasn't advisable to jump so many releases ahead, when we reported one of the bugs. After I explained to him how I had checked release notes AND opened a case before going ahead, he funnily didn't mention it again though.

So in short, proceed with caution and better take a few extra steps. Just my 2 cents.

[Seeker_]

Greaat...

So knowing what you do now, how would you proceed. We've postponed for several weeks.

Thanks,