Welcome to Dell Technologies Connectrix MDS How-To Series. How to perform NX-OS code upgrade on the Cisco MDS switches Reference: Dell Knowledge Article # 180494. This video was created to demonstrate how to perform a secure remote NX-OS upgrade on a Cisco MDS switch.
In this video we will be upgrading an MDS switch from NX-OS 6.2.19 to 6.2.25. You can use this procedure to perform any OS upgrade on an MDS switch. Before you begin download the NX-OS file for the particular switch model from the Dell EMC Support site that matches the target version. Unzip the file in a TFTP or FTP location and make sure the system image and Kickstart of the NX-OS is present which could be used to transfer the files to the switch. If an incompatible file is used, the upgrade will fail. Capture switch logs using “show tech-support details”, which will be needed for any escalations or troubleshooting.
Perform basic health checks from Switch CLI as shown in the video. Back up and save the switch configuration in an external FTP or TFTP server. Before we proceed with the upgrade, take a configuration backup of the switch using the command, “copy running-config startup-config” to save the current running configuration of the switch on the non-volatile RAM. Then save it to an external TFTP or FTP server.
Gather switch logs using “show tech-support details”, which will be needed for any escalations or troubleshooting from the EMC support team. After that, we need to perform some basic health checks to make sure that we don’t run into any problems later on. Execute command “show version” to take note of the current OS code level in the switch mode number. Run command “show module” to verify the status of each of the modules is okay and supervisor modules are active.
Execute command “show flogi database” and take note of number of logins before the upgrade. Check the output of “show system health statistics” to verify the switch health-management status. Run command “show vsan” to confirm if the VSAN on the switch are active. For a director-level switch, execute “show system redundancy status” to check the status of the supervisor modules. Once all the pre-checks are done copy both the system image file and Kickstart file to the bootflash directory from a TFTP or FTP server as shown.
After that, run the command “show install all impact” to display the software compatibility matrix of a specific image. It will run the system image on all the modules and let us know the impact of the upgrade. Perform the upgrade by issuing the “install all command” on the active supervisor module from the switch console or your current logged-in session. The format of the “install all” command is as shown.
The command will extract the firmware files perform a compatibility check inform you if any module being upgraded will be nondisruptive or a disruptive one and ask whether you want to continue the upgrade or not. This would take at least ten minutes to complete.
Once it is done, perform some basic checks to make sure that the upgrade has been successful, or not. For example by running commands like “show version” and “show module”. This procedure could be used to perform an NX-OS code upgrade on an MDS switch. Please refer to the indicated documents for more information.
Thank you for watching.