In today's video, we're going to be walking
through how to perform a software upgrade on a Cisco Viptela SD-WAN environment. In my
case, I'm going to be doing this through a lab built out in EVE-NG - which you can see on the
screen now. I use this lab fairly regularly to build out templates, try out new features, or
even just play around with some of the APIs. As you can see on the screen it's a fairly
straightforward SD-WAN lab with a vManage controller, single vBond, a redundant pair of
vSmarts. I also have two vEdge devices that are accomplished using the vEdge Cloud image
- and those are representing branch locations, both of which have a connection out to an internet
connection, as well as an MPLS connection. I'm also making use of EVE-NG's bridging features to
provide an actual external internet connection to the lab - so that both of these branch
sites actually do have internet connectivity. Now in order to try out some new features I
want to play around with, I need to upgrade my lab - which is currently sitting on version
18.4.302. And I'm going to go ahead and go all the way up to 20.3.2. And that's what
we'll walk through in this video today. So the first thing we need to do, is go ahead and
jump over to Cisco's software downloads and grab the images that we need. So once we're there we
will search for SD-WAN and click SD-WAN when it comes up in the drop-down menu. And when we're
taken to this page, we need to be aware that the sections for vEdge Cloud, vManage, and vSmart
software downloads are only going to be used for new installations or new images. What we need
to click on is the SD-WAN software update tab. And once we reach this page, from the
left side we'll go ahead and select the version that we want to download
from - in my case I'm using 20.3.2. And we'll only see two available images - one is
going to be a fairly sizable image that's going to be used just to upgrade the vManage appliance.
And then the other image is a little bit smaller, and is mostly a universal image that will be used
for all of the other controllers and edge devices: vSmart, vEdge, and vBond. So I'll go ahead and
download these in the background real quick. Let's go ahead and hop over to vManage
and get started with the upgrade. Alright - so now I have vManage up on the
screen. And we'll go ahead and log in with an administrative user. And as the dashboard
loads, there's not a whole lot exciting going on - my lab's been powered off for a
couple of weeks and I'm getting it all back up and running now to test out some new things
shortly. But we can see that everything looks good and connected - our vManage is up, our
vBond is up, both of our edge devices are up, and have connectivity to each other, and
our vSmart controllers are up as well. So as I mentioned I'll be upgrading from my
current version which is 18.4.302 - and we can check this by going up to the dashboard help
in the corner, and clicking "About". A nd it'll show that the current platform and application
version is at 18.4.302. Now the upgrade process is going to be a couple of steps - the first
thing that we're going to need to do, is upload all of the software images that we downloaded
into our local vManage software repository. We'll do this by going over on the
left side, clicking the maintenance tab and dropping into the software repository page.
So once we're on this page, we'll click on the add new software - and in the drop down we'll see that
we have the option of vManage or remote server. We're going to go ahead and use vManage which
will upload all of the software updates to this vManage controller directly for distribution
to the other controllers and endpoints. However, we could host all of the software on a
remote repository and have everything reference that to download the image - and that would be the
remote server option. So let's go ahead and click vManage and we'll be prompted to just go ahead and
upload our images. I have both of the images here from the download earlier, and I'll just go ahead
and drag and drop those and let those upload. It'll take just a minute or two to upload these
images, so we'll come back in just a second. Once that's all done, the page will update -
and we'll see now that we have an available software image to push to our endpoints
- and that is for version 20.3.2. Next we can go ahead and get started by jumping
straight over to the software upgrade page. Now before we get started in pushing the
upgrade out to all of our appliances, I want to cover the question of: "Where
do I start? How do I roll this out? What hierarchy should I follow?" - and that's
pretty straightforward. So we're going to start at the top and move down. First we want to
upgrade the vManage appliance, since that's going to be the master controller that manages the
configurations for all of the devices underneath. Once vManage is done upgrading, then we'll
go ahead and push the image to vBond, then to our v-smart controllers. Now normally in
a production upgrade, you would do these one at a time - including pushing the upgrade to only
one vSmart controller, allowing it to upgrade, reboot, come back online, re-establish all of
its connections to the edge devices and other controllers, then you would proceed with
upgrading the second vSmart controller. Since this is a lab I'll go ahead and just
upgrade everything at once, and Viptela will still go ahead and manage that upgrading only
one at a time, to try to maintain availability. Once we have the entire control plane upgraded to
our latest version, then we'll go ahead and start pushing out to our edge devices. In my case, I
only have two edge sites and both of them are only single homed - there's no high availability built
in. So I'll go ahead and just push the image out to both devices at the same time. Again, if this
is a production environment, we might not want to just push it out to all sites at the same time.
We might want to schedule a maintenance window to allow that outage. Or if we had redundant
WAN edge appliances at the remote site, we would maintain availability by only upgrading
one at a time. So let's go ahead and get started. We'll jump over to the vManage tab, and we
see that our vManage controller is already in there. We'll click upgrade, select our
version from the dropdown, and click upgrade. Now what this is doing in the background - is
going ahead and grabbing that image from the repository, uploading it to vManage, and staging
it for install. This isn't actually installing the image just yet - we'll get to that in a
minute. Depending on the resources allocated to the systems that you're using, this could take
a couple of minutes - so we'll be right back. Okay and now we can see that that software
install is complete. We'll go back over to the software upgrade page and we'll jump back
over to the vManage tab. And the next thing that we need to do is actually activate the image.
So we'll go ahead and hit the activate button, select the version that we want to activate, and
click activate. This is going to be the function that will reboot the vManage controller and allow
it to come up with the new software version that we've selected. Again this might take just a
couple of minutes for the software upgrade to complete - so we'll give it a minute for vManage
to come back online and check back just a second. All right once our vManage software upgrade is
complete - we'll next head over to the vBond and vSmart controllers. We'll go back over
to the maintenance tab and select software upgrade. Next we'll click the controller
tab - and again as I mentioned earlier, you might want to do this in the proper order
- but because this is a lab environment, I will select all of the vSmart and vBond
controllers and click upgrade at once. And once again, we'll be prompted to select
the version that we want to upgrade to - and in this case we do have the checkbox, where we
can select activate and reboot. This will tell it to just go ahead and do all of the steps that
we just completed with the vManage server at once. And again as I mentioned earlier Viptela will
handle deploying these in the proper order and proper pacing. So first it's going to go ahead
and upgrade the vBond controller first. It'll wait until that reboots, comes back online with the
new version, and establishes connections - then it will go ahead and upgrade the first vSmart
controller. And again, allow it to upgrade, reboot, come back online, and then finally
upgrading the secondary vSmart controller. Okay and now once that software upgrade is
complete - we can go back to the upgrade page, and we see that all of our controllers
show a current version of 20.3.2. So lastly we can move over to the WAN edge tab,
select our edge devices for the branch sites, and do the same process. We'll click the
upgrade button, select our software version, select the "Activate and Reboot"
checkbox - and then click upgrade. Since these are both independent remote branch
sites within my lab environment, vManage will go ahead and push the image out to both sites
simultaneously and reboot them with the new image. Again, if this is in a production environment, you would want to complete this
step in a planned outage window. Once the edge devices come back online, our
upgrade across the entire environment should be completed. One way we can check that, is
by going over to the monitor tab and dropping into the network page. And we can see all
of our devices here - both vEdges, vSmarts, vBond, and vManage controllers - and their
current software version which is 20.3.2. And it appears they have all of their control
connections reestablished and all ready to go. Okay and now that my lab environment has been
successfully upgraded to the latest version, we're ready to go in testing some
new features and functionality. So that's all I had for this
video - Thank you for watching!!!
