DS4700 firmware upgrade speed

Some of this is dependant on your LAN speed. They go a lot faster for me if I'm upgrading something on the Local LAN. Slower through the WAN to another site. MUCH slower if I'm connected from home through a VPN. If you have to do it remotely you might want to consider using a remote control product to a host at the same site as the switch and launching the web browser from there.

As for times on a local LAN, I've seen anything from 5 to 10 minutes. I usually plan for 10 per switch and it is usually closer to the 5 minute mark, but it can vary. I've seen as high as 10-15 minutes through a WAN connection to another site.

If you are using Connectrix Manager (or EFCM/DCFM/etc) then I can't really speak to it as I've always done them directly through the web GUI on the switch.

Thank you Allen.
I am doing every operations directly from the local LAN which is 100 Mb full duplex and I will upgrade through the web GUI on the switch too.
Have you experienced a slow speed to get "Data Collection" ? I am surprised to see the download at 10 kb/s. Is it normal ?

Olivier

When you go to Maintenance -> System Files -> right Click on Data Collection and you will get a zip with switch logs. It is useful when you have a problem. Could you please try on your switchs to see if it is a slow too ?

I just checked and I averaged about 25KB/s to my laptop over 10MB link. Does seem a bit slow, but significantly faster than you were getting.

Sorry I have forgotten to reply to this thread.
At last when I have upgraded it was very fast and I was very surprised because no server saw the upgrade !

Glad to hear it went well. I've never had a problem with firmware upgrades. So far I've got a perfect record for the servers not noticing our upgrades.

Firmware upgrades are no longer a pain in the butt these days

Soooooooooooometimes a switch will suffer from a real reboot. I've now seen that happen twice. Once with a Cisco MDS9124 and once with a Brocade 4900. After the reboots everything was ok.

Message was edited by:
RRR
I've installed about 150 switches in the last 3 eyar or so.

Not sure what you mean by "suffer from a real reboot". Could you clarify?

A real reboot: the switch went down and not just eth, but FC as well. Luckily in these occasions we had 2 fabrics (of course) and the hosts never knew what happened, but still, not all firmware upgrades worked well. But it only happens in rare occasions, so I would not worry about it, just as long as you don't upgrade >1 switch at a time.

Now I understand. I was reading it a bit different from what you meant, but it makes perfect sense now. Fortunately I haven't run into any firmware upgrades which actually rebooted a switch... Although the recent FOS upgrade has an "erroneous" message on the web interface stating that the switch will reboot. If you do the same upgrade through CLI it correctly identifies it as a non-disruptive reset.