Recently I needed to upgrade the code on one of our Metro Ethernet switches as some of the EVC and bridge domain settings weren’t operating quite as I had envisaged.
I’m new to these switches and the upgrade process is slightly different to the traditional ‘copy tftp flash’, reboot and cross fingers method I’m used to with other Cisco routers.
The first difference I noticed is when I looked at the flash directory.
lab-me3600-1#show flash:
Directory of flash:/
2 -rwx 976 Nov 28 2014 16:26:54 +00:00 vlan.dat
3 -rwx 1182 Aug 5 2014 09:52:29 +00:00 FOCxxxxxxxxxxxxx.lic
4 -rwx 2261 Aug 5 2014 08:52:08 +00:00 credential
5 -rwx 4492 Oct 21 2014 13:58:40 +00:00 config.text
6 -rwx 5 Oct 21 2014 13:58:40 +00:00 private-config.text
7 drwx 512 Mar 1 1993 00:29:24 +00:00 me360x-universalk9-mz.153
15 -rwx 2072 Oct 21 2014 13:58:40 +00:00 multiple-fs
Usually I’d expect to see a single .bin file but here the software file is stored in a specific directory.
To upgrade the IOS on these switches you use the command:
lab-me3600-1#archive download-sw tftp://[tftp server]/[file]
like such
lab-me3600-1#archive download-sw tftp:/10.50.50.1/me360x-universalk9-tar.154-3.S1.tar
By default this will go off and download the image, extract it and change the boot variable to the new file (no more boot system flash!). There are some options with this command like:
/reload – automatically reload after upgrade
/no-set-boot – leaves the boot variable untouched.
Cisco advise that you can have a maximum of 2 images in the flash directory but I didn’t get to test this as there wasn’t enough space on the disk!
After the new image had downloaded (but before extraction) I saw the following:
Deleting `flash:/me360x-universalk9-mz.153′ to create required space
This was the process freeing up the required space to allow the new file to be extracted. This is not a problem as you could always download the previous image again if you didn’t want to go through with the upgrade (as long as the switch isn’t reloaded!).There is also a /safe option which does not delete the old version but presumably you’d need to have enough storage to hold both images.
Once the extraction had finished I checked the boot variables to make sure that everything was OK:
lab-me3600-1#sh boot
BOOT path-list : flash:/me360x-universalk9-mz.154-3.S1/me360x-universalk9-mz.154-3.S1.bin
Config file : flash:/config.text
Private Config file : flash:/private-config.text
Manual Boot : no
HELPER path-list :
All looks good so reload the box and it’s all done.