recommendation on upgrade path

[cangeles_]

Hello,

My group recently inherited the administration of a pair of SA4000s in an active/passive cluster. They are currently at v6.0r6. Juniper Support says that we can go all the way to v6.3r4 but that's too aggressive for us. We were thinking of a much more conservative path. First, going to 6.0r11 then to the latest release in each incremental version, v6.1r7 to v6.2r5 and finally to v6.3r4. Between each upgrade we would have a period of time to verify that it's stable before we do the next one.

Any recommendations from the community? Go straight to v6.3r4 or do incremental upgrades?

Thank you!

[firewall72_]

Hello,

I typically tell my customers to check the release notes and new features before upgrading. I also advise them to stay away from vx.xr1's whenever possible (like the current 6.4r1). These have a history of causing the most headaches for people. However, in your case you guys are running old firmware and I would recommend 6.3r4. I think your approach is sound, but in my opinion you could still run into issues. I would schedule a maitenance window, upgrade, and test as much as possible. If needed, you could always rollback. I hope this helps.

-John

[cangeles_]

Thank you, John!

Can you tell me what updates will occur on the client when we upgrade to v6.3r4? Also, I've seen some suggestions from people to install the Juniper Installer for this version ahead of time to allow for non-admin updates. Do you suggest that? Where do I get it without doing the upgrade?

We don't have a test box so we will be breaking our A/P cluster and upgrading on one of the systems. I believe we would then make the external address of the upgraded box the address of our cluster to do testing.

Sorry for the newbie questions!

Thanks!

[firewall72_]

Hello,

The client apps will automatically upgrade to the new version. With regards to pre-installation, I'm not sure if these packages are availabe on the Juniper site. I've always downloaded them from the Admin UI (Maintenance, System, Installers). In theory, you could upgrade one box, download the installers and then rollback. However, I've always tested in a lab or during a maitenance window first, then proceeded accordingly. I hope this helps.

-John

[danr_]

I recently purchased 2 SA2500s that are configured in an active/passive cluster and innitially were running v6.1R6.. After we were operational I had an issue that forced an upgrade to 6.3R4. I downloaded and installed the new version in minutes and had no issues.

Hope this helps!

[df_]

I'd go straight there. You really want to go through 4 upgrades and potentially have your users upgrade 4 times and run into different issues each time you upgrade? You can always roll back to the previous version if you run into a major problem. We've upgraded from 5.3R7 to 6.4R1 without any major issues.

[cangeles_]

Thanks, for your recommendations. We've decided to go straight to 6.3r4 but we're going to break the cluster and upgrade only one node to let us do some testing. We have Central Manager that would do the upgrade automatically on the second node but we want to do some testing first.

[DanSmart_]

There is a major change in Hostchecker in version 6.3. Now you must specify signatures by "versions" rather than days. Because of this change, I could no longer use the viruschecker, since the maximum versions was 10, and that's way to short for my users.

-=Dan=-