Reference Guide

388 | High Availability
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Warm Upgrade
Warm Upgrade is supported on platform e
Warm software upgrades use warm failover, which means that FTOS reboots the secondary RPM and all
line cards and SFMs. The chassis remains online during the upgrade, but forwarding is interrupted, as
shown in Table 21-4, "Control Plane and Data Plane Status during Warm Upgrade," in High Availability.
FTOS supports warm software upgrades under two conditions:
• between consecutive feature releases where only the second digit differs between the running FTOS
version number and the upgrade version number. For example, and upgrade from FTOS version
7.6.1.0 to 7.7.1.0 is warm.
• between two consecutive maintenance releases of the same feature release. For example, upgrading
from 7.7.1.0 to 7.7.1.1 is warm.
Table 21-4, "Control Plane and Data Plane Status during Warm Upgrade," in High Availability show the
warm upgrade and downtime impact, if any, which each step.
Configure Cache Boot
Cache Boot is supported on platforms: c e
Cache Boot is supported on E-Series ExaScale e
x
with FTOS 8.2.1.0. and later.
The Dell Force10 system has the ability to boot the chassis using a cached FTOS image. FTOS stores the
system image on the bootflash for each processor so that:
• the processors do not have to download the images during bootup, and
• the processors can boot in parallel rather than serially.
Table 21-4. Control Plane and Data Plane Status during Warm Upgrade
Download 6.3.1.1 to
RPMs
Reboot RPM1 to
Upgrade
Initiate Warm
Failover
Reboot RPM0 to
Upgrade
RPM 0 7.6.1.0 Primary 7.6.1.0 Primary 7.6.1.0 Secondary 7.7.1.0 Secondary
RPM 1 7.6.1.0 Secondary 7.7.1.0 Secondary 7.7.1.0 Primary 7.7.1.0 Primary
Line Cards 7.6.1.0 7.6.1.0 7.7.1.0 7.7.1.0
Control Plane Operational Operational Interruption Operational
Forwarding State Forwarding Forwarding Interruption Forwarding
FTOS Behavior: On E-Series ExaScale, the SFM auto upgrade feature is not supported with
cacheboot. If you attempt an SFM auto upgrade, you must reload the chassis to recover.