[f-nsp] XMR Software Upgrade Path from 4.0.1a

[George B.]

We use 5.0 and are planning to upgrade to 5.1 soon-ish.  The main
reason is the "cross chassis trunking" or MCT (like Arista's mLAG).
Basically you can do what amounts to stacking MLX/XMR units.  We
wanted that code version to get some mileage on it first and wanted to
wait until there were a couple of bugfix releases.  They are at
5.1.00b currently though I don't know how many are using the MCT
function so can't get a feel for how much that feature has been
exercised.

The data center where we need to deploy that was actually engineered
with that feature in mind.  The topology is pretty close to that shown
in Fig. 1 on page 3 of this document:

http://www.brocade.com/downloads/documents/white_papers/Brocade_Multi-Chassis_Trunking_WP.pdf

Except we use Arista 7100 switches instead of the CES shown (basically
because the 7100's are 10G switches and the Brocade TurboIron doesn't
support MCT).

Is anyone here using the MCT feature on MLX/XMR ?


On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Gerald Krause <gk at ax.tc> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> yes, looks like that I have to upgrade the FPGAs as well. But I'm a
> little bit more interested in opinions concerning the 5.1 software in
> general. How does it feel in the real - does anybody use this train in
> production currently at all?
>
> The main reason for the decision to upgrade our systems is that we
> observed some (rare) FIB issues in the past, e.g. "IPv4/Pv6 route exist
> but no corresponding record is in th FIB" or the other way around - we
> saw "records in the FIB without a matching IPv4/IPv6 route".
>
> I've checked nearly all release notes since 4.0.1a and every notes for a
> newer version has make think "oh my good, don't use the former one" and
> so I'm simply end up in 5.1 ;-).
>
> --
> Gerald   (ax/tc)
>
> Am 11.01.11 16:13, schrieb Chris Costa:
>> I believe your IronWare upgrade to 5.0 will have to include upgrading FPGA images as well:
>>
>> Mgmt Modules:
>> - Requires MBRIDGE, Rev 32
>>
>> Interface Modules:
>> - PBIFSP2.bin, Rev 3.21
>> - XPPSP2.bin, Rev 6.03
>>
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>
>> On Jan 11, 2011, at 3:24 AM, Gerald Krause wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> we have some XMRs in production, all with the older 4.0.1a code. The
>>> Systems are doing mainly L3 things like OSPF, BGP and VRRP within an
>>> IPv4/IPv6 dualstack environment but no *PLS or special L2 services at
>>> the moment.
>>> We plan to upgrade the systems with an newer software release and I
>>> wondering if there exist any arguments against using the latest 5.1 code?
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> --
>>> Gerald   (ax/tc)
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundry-nsp mailing list
>>> foundry-nsp at puck.nether.net
>>> http://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/foundry-nsp
>>
>>
>
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