Question

Upgrading Cisco ASA5510 Active/Standby failover pair.

Asked by: MarkJenks

I currently have a pair of Cisco ASA5510's that are in active/standby.

They are both running security plus and version 8.04 and ASDM 6.1551.

What is the proper way to upgrade the pair?   I already have TFTP'd the .bin files to Disk0: on both devices.  But since they will be different versions, what is the best way to do this?

I was thinking, reboot the standby to the new version, install the new activation-key, and then flip it to active and verify it for a few days. Then upgrade the other standby?

Thoughts?

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Asked On
2009-08-10 at 10:35:50ID24640684
Tags

cisco upgrade asa 8.04 8.2 failover active/standby

Topics

Cisco PIX Firewall

,

Networking Hardware Firewalls

,

Enterprise Firewalls

Participating Experts
2
Points
125
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: kenboonejrPosted on 2009-08-10 at 10:46:08ID: 25062171

 

by: MarkJenksPosted on 2009-08-10 at 11:02:30ID: 25062333

Does that also work for license upgrades?

 

by: kenboonejrPosted on 2009-08-10 at 11:09:02ID: 25062386

So here is a link that discussing the license upgrade.   It references PIX but says it applies to the ASA as well.  The deal is that for failover to work, the boxes need to have an identical license.  If there is any difference you will break failover.  So for instance I had a customer running failover and they purchased some more SSL licenses.  They did not purchase them for each box just the primary box.  This upgraded the license and failover immediately quit, because they did not have the same type of license.  So if you upgrade the activation key and they don't match the failover then failover breaks.  

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2030/products_tech_note09186a00806b1c0f.shtml

 

by: decoleurPosted on 2009-08-10 at 20:59:03ID: 25066083

I do not think it is a zero downtime upgrade because you are going to have to go from 8.0.4 to 8.2.1. you could upgrade the primary and bounce it at which time it should fail over to the secondary and then wait until the primary  came back up and then fail the secondary back over to it and then upgrade the secondary.

Good luck with that.

-t

remember to upgrade your asdm as well, 6.1551 is kind of buggy.

 

by: MarkJenksPosted on 2009-08-18 at 08:00:13ID: 31613821

Well, everything went out the window and I have TAC involved now.   Found a bug in 8.21 that make everything go south.   So much for 0 downtime, now it's a 5 hour maint window with TAC on the phone.

Thanks anyways!

-Mark

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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