[cisco-voip] Do you test upgrades? Or fail back?

[Ed Leatherman]

Hi Sean,

Major upgrades - build in test lab if possible. Only patch if needed for
compatibility or new feature. I don't load .0 releases of callmanager, been
burned before on them. Wait for the .1 version imo

CM, CER
Service releases - only if needed for a bug fix, but if i'm doing a major
upgrade I'll usually load any subsequent SR/ES's as well to get as many
bugfixes as possible for the downtime i'm already incurring. I try to let
new ES's stew in the wild for a few weeks before I load on our production
servers, unless its something super urgent. They seem pretty well tested
nowadays though.

Unity, IPCCX
Windows OS - We try to do these on a regular basis, if something
particularly nasty comes out we evaluate risk and if needed patch ASAP.

IPCC Express - Only when I absolutely have to do I patch the CRS application
itself. I avoid patching it like the plague. Bad luck with introducing bugs.
Unity - Only as needed for compatibility or bug fix.

Always have a good backup available and a back-out plan. The second
partition on the appliance servers is good enhancement for your back-out
plan. I also have a standard test plan I run through after any updates to
test out major features/dial patterns.

Also.. Hope, pray :)

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Sean Walberg <sean at ertw.com> wrote:

> What do people here do when planning for an upgrade (major? minor?) to CUCM
> and other components (Unity, IPCCx, CER, etc)?  Do you stage something in a
> test environment? P2V machines and test on those?  Hope, pray, and rely on
> the failback mechanisms?
>
> Also, do you apply every patch? Only when you think it's relevent?  Never
> patch?
>
> We're about 70 phones in to our deployment of a few thousand, and I'm
> starting to get asked to put a policy together to answer these questions.
> I'm curious what has worked for people.
>
> Thanks
>
> Sean
>
> --
> Sean Walberg <sean at ertw.com> http://ertw.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> cisco-voip mailing list
> cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
> https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
>
>


-- 
Ed Leatherman
Assistant Director, Voice Services
West Virginia University
Telecommunications and Network Operations
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-voip/attachments/20080922/6aef8e27/attachment.html>