[c-nsp] ASR 9000 Upgrade Expectations

[brad dreisbach]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 11:10:53AM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
>James Bensley wrote:
>> Or if you are erasing and installing from fresh on the new version,
>> then the box is down for pretty much the whole 2 hours.
>
>turboboot is not necessarily a bad idea if you're doing jumps from one
>major version to the next or even 4.3 to 6.0.  The turboboot process
>will add 30-40 minutes to the overall time schedule, but at least you
>end up with a clean slate afterwards.
>
>Regardless of what way you go about it, you need to make sure that the
>tftp server is local.  Otherwise the crappy tftp implementation in the
>bootrom will take ages due to ping-pong and there's no option for doing
>this over tcp.

there is no option to turboboot over tcp currently, that is true. if you are 
doing inband upgrades you can use ftp. if you use tarballs to install your 
pie/smu bundle, they added a "mem" option in 5.3.3 that uses ram vs disk to 
untar. there was also another enhancement in the pipeline to increase the disk
write speed. i had tested it using a rommon variable that i cant recall now,
but it did seem to improve the speed somewhat. i'm not sure if they have 
implemented this by default. 

i am beta testing 6.1.1(64b linux) in our lab and was provided a 5.3.3 smu 
that enables a new rommon that supports pxe boot over tcp(ive specifically 
tested http).

-b