[cisco-voip] How Many Docs Does it Take to Prep for an Upgrade?

[Ryan Huff]

Typically, the only time that I'll stage an upgrade in a lab environment for a dry run is if I am doing something that I haven't done in a while or I have reason to think it might fail (you can screw up as much as you want in the lab ;). I used to do it for almost every major upgrade.

I am a fan of doing the upgrade locally, grabbing the DRS from the local (upgraded) environment then restoring to a newly built environment in the customer network. This is a habit that extends from the pizza box days. However, with everything being virtualized now, I have become a fan of doing it all in the customer network.

I think each method has its pros and cons and the context of the customer engagement will generally point you to which method is better or more efficient for you. 

Thanks,

Ryan

Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE Device

-------- Original message --------
From: Anthony Holloway <avholloway+cisco-voip at gmail.com> 
Date:10/16/2015  3:41 PM  (GMT-05:00) 
To: Ryan Huff <ryanhuff at outlook.com> 
Cc: Cisco VoIP Group <cisco-voip at puck.nether.net> 
Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] How Many Docs Does it Take to Prep for an Upgrade? 

You sound more organized than I am.  I would like to see what you have, sure.  Thanks for the offer.

I've never staged an upgrade in my lab, though I have heard of plenty of people doing this.  Is it really something to consider or is that a thing of the past?  Like pulling a drive from the array?  Not too mention, I rarely have time to perform two upgrades on a project like this.  I barely get enough time to upgrade the system once.

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 1:56 PM, Ryan Huff <ryanhuff at outlook.com> wrote:
I use an excel spread sheet with a hyperlink to the base doc in one sheet with notes and details gathered in the sheet.Then I create additional worksheets of subordinate documentation and notes and then make references from the base sheet to the subordinate sheets. I also have a sheet for customer discovery (current dns, ip, device loads .... etc). It ends up looking a lot like a Gantt chart.

If you'd like, I can sanitize and send one to you, to compare notes and see if there is anything of use to you.

Also, If time permits, and it's feasible,  I like to stage a mock upgrade in my lab with customer data (drs ... etc) and do a dry run.


-------- Original message --------
From: Anthony Holloway 
Date:10/16/2015 2:38 PM (GMT-05:00) 
To: Cisco VoIP Group 
Subject: [cisco-voip] How Many Docs Does it Take to Prep for an Upgrade? 

Does anyone else do this?  Gather all of the documentation ahead of time, because inevitably you're going to revisit a document more than once?  There are a lot of documents to gather!  Anything I could be doing better?  Tips?  Tricks?

I create a spreadsheet of all of the pertinent documents I need to review or reference, like in this screenshot.  There's over 90 documents in this list.  Granted, I don't read them all front to back, but some I do, and  for others I need to reference information within them nonetheless.  You never know when you might find a small font hidden note in there.

E.g., From the 8945 Release Notes

"Release 9.4(2)SR1 can only be upgraded from 9.3(4) and later. Releases prior to 9.3(4) have to be upgraded to 9.3(4) first."

Source: 8945 9.4(2)SR1 Release Notes

I actually missed this one recently, and unlike 7900 series phones, they phone will just brick itself and never register.  Causing you to walk to every phone and reset power to it, or walk the mac address tables of your layer 2 network and shut/no shut the ports.



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