It can be confusing to know which Catalyst 9K switch to position on your campus. The most recent release to the Catalyst 9K switching family; the Catalyst 9600 brings a modular chassis to the core/aggregation layer and is positioned to replace the 6500 & 6800.
Heres a quick reference aimed to assist you in your upgrades and have confidence that you will meet the present and future needs of the campus.
I first want to show you the file(s) that each mode references. I’ll use the show version command to do this.
You can see from the previous output that the 3850 is running in BUNDLE mode. Secondly, the line that starts with ‘System image file is..” This line is the name and location of the booted Cisco IOS XE bundle file. Notice that this is a .bin extension.
Again using the show version command, in the previous output the 3650 is running in INSTALL mode. This time the line that starts with ‘System image file is..” is referencing the name and location of the provisioning file ‘packages.conf‘.
I am executing this on a stack so you can see that the operation is expanding the bundle (.bin) file to switch 1 and switch 2. This is essentially unpacking .pkg files from the running .bin file on the switch.
Notice that the switch attempts to create a packages.conf file but it already exists, so it creates a file called ‘running-packages.conf‘. This isn’t a big deal. If you want your file to be named packages.conf, just rename the original packages.conf to something else before you run the above command.
After this finishes, we can view the flash:/ to see our pkg files.
Here we see two .pkg versions, 03.07.04E.pkg and 03.07.05E.pkg. Which one is the most recent one? 03.07.05E.pkg is the most recent because that is the version we extracted from our current running cat3k_caa-universalk9.SPA.03.07.05.E152-3.bin file. Also, notice the running-packages.conf file.
Let’s change the boot system variable to reference our new .conf file.
Note: Check to see if you already have a boot variable defined. Change it so that on next boot you load your packages.conf file and not the .bin file. Check the boot var with the command show boot to confirm.
Save your running config to start up and reload the switch.
I got my hands on a Cisco Catalyst 3650-48PD-L switch which is the first access level switch that I’ve dealt with that is running IOS-XE. IOS-XE isn’t new, I prefer it over IOS because of its Linux base and the processing advantages it has. So today we will be going through the software upgrade process for a 3650 running in install mode.
You can view my other post on how to convert IOS XE from Bundled running mode to Install running mode.
As a quick introduction, here are some differences between IOS and IOS-XE.
IOS
Monolithic – The OS and its processes run in the same address space on the same hardware.
A single process could crash the entire system
IOS-XE
Runs a Linux OS
Modular System
Multiprocessing allows for workloads to be shared across multiple CPUs.
Individual sub packages create IOS-XE that can be upgraded individually
Now that you have some understanding of the differences between IOS and IOS-XE you need to understand that there is two modes of operation.
The Cisco Catalyst 3650, 3850, and 9K series switches have two modes of operation, Install Mode and Bundle Mode.
Install Mode
Install mode uses a package-provisioning file named packages.conf, which is in charge of booting the switch. There are several .pkg files found in the flash drive that provide a specific function to the OS. Cisco recommends not altering any of the files.
Bundle Mode
Bundle mode uses monolithic Cisco IOS images to boot the switch. It consumes more memory than Install mode because packages are extracted from the bundle and copied to RAM.
I would suggest operating in Install mode as this is the default, and provides you with a modular system, you can switch them if you choose.
Lets continue into our upgrade..
You can see from the output of the 3650 that the current software version is 03.06.05b.e and it is running in Install Mode.
Download your image from Cisco. The new software version here will be 03.06.06E. I have chosen to use a USB drive to place my source image on, but you can still use a transfer protocol like TFTP or SCP.
After confirming that you have your source image in its proper location, execute the following command on the switch with your source image accurately defined.
The switch prepares the image for installation; below you see the switch performing pre-installation tasks. It will ask you to confirm a reload. Confirm a reload by typing Yes.
It will take several minutes to reload, during the reload processes the switch does several post-installation tasks such as updating the Front-end Microcode.
Once the switch has successfully finished reloading, you can log back in and confirm that the new version was successfully applied. Below we have successfully loaded 03.06.06E onto the switch.
As a post clean up task you should execute the command software clean switch 1. This will remove the packages.conf and .pkg files associated to the old image.
Switch#software clean switch 1
Here is what the flash looks like post upgrade..
That wraps up the upgrade process. I hope that this has been helpful for you.
Apronets 