Cisco Firewall :: ASA 5520 Upgrade 8.0(4) To 8.4.2 / Zero Downtime?
Mar 11, 2012
We are currently on 8.0(4) and planning on upgrading our failover pair to 8.4.2, I read some documents saying that we can perform a zero downtime upgrade.
According the below documents Version 8.2 supports mismatch memory failover, [URL]
Upgrade Path:
Active Firewall: Standby Firewall:
8.0(4) 8.0(4)-->8.2.2
8.0(4) Upgrade RAM-2G---Reload
faiover to standby 8.2.2
8.0(4)--->8.2.2 8.2.2
[code]...
Can I perform zero downtime upgrade with the above upgrade path? Will both the firewalls act as a failover pair if one is on 8.2.2 and other is on 8.4.2.
"Performing Zero Downtime Upgrades for Failover Pairs
The two units in a failover configuration should have the same major (first number) and minor (second number) software version. However, you do not need to maintain version parity on the units during the upgrade process; you can have different versions on the software running on each unit and still maintain failover support." [URL]
We are planning to upgrade IOS on a 5520 pair, from 7.2.4 to 8.2.4, and cause minimum outage. And according to the documentation, we can do the zero downtime IOS upgrade by failing over to the standby ASA and back.
[URL]
So, can during this process, can we go from 7.2.5 to 8.0.5 (last maintenance release), or do we have to move to 8.0.2 first ?
Since the "zero-downtime upgrade" is not supported, I would like to validate the process I put together for upgrading a failover pair of asa5550 with the characteristics below. Specifically I am concerned with the role of the standby during the upgrade. This is my setup:
.- single context mode .- active/standby .- current firmware asa821-k8.bin / asdm-621.bin .- role: firewall and VPN concentrator for segmented server farm network. Dynamic/static/exemption NAT heavily used.
My target is asa842-k8.bin / asdm-645.bin and I am doing a two step upgrade (8.2(1) -> 8.3(1) -> 8.4(2)) to avoid the "unidirectional" attribute and CSCtf89372 bug issues. This is a short version of what I have in mind:
.- Verify stability of failover pair and make adequate backups before beginning. .- plug into the console of active, ssh into active and standby. .- vpn/act(config)# no failover ( disable failover from active )
[Code]....
After reboot, point to 8.4(2) and reload again. Same concern regarding the standby unit.
I understand there might be configuration tweaks needed to the NAT configuration. After second reboot test connectivity and if successful, on active "failover", "write standby" and "failover reload-standby". Otherwise "downgrade" and back to the drawing board.
I need to upgrade the active/standby failover pair of 5510 ASA's to have1 Gig DRAM each, and I am trying to plan out the upgrade process. I'm looking for a zero downtime upgrade process.
I know that the failover pair has to have the same amount of memory, so how do I perform a zero-downtime upgrade process?Can I power off the standby unit and upgrade it's memory first? Or will it cause a memory mismatch between the active and standby units when it is powered on?
Is it possible to upgrade a c3750-stack one member at a time to avoid downtime? I need to keep L3-functionality up.
If I have one etherchannel from access-switch (2 channel-ports in 3750, in different stack-members), my 3750-stack as a distribution layer switch, and another etherchannel (also spread over multiple stack members) to core, can I upgrade the entire stack without traffic interruption?
I'd like to see some REAL LIFE comparisons of ASA firewall throughput (a bit like this one for ISR G2 Routers - [URL].
The reason I ask is that I recently upgraded a firewall from an ASA5505 to an ASA5520 on a small network where the only outside connectivity was a single 10meg Internet circuit with an IPSEC VPN (not landed on the firewall but on a router) to another site.
When I swapped out the firewall the users noticed a big improvement. The firewall is not doing anything out of the ordinary - no IPS or VPN, just standard state full inspection.
We wish to upgrade 8.2(3) to 8.2(5) on our asa 5520 and 5510. I have been looking for Cisco guides for installation instructions but havent been able to track any. or is it just as striaght forward as copy image, reboot secondary and the primary
I have a 2 ASA 5520 firewalls for high availability and need to upgrade IOS from 7.2(4) to 8.2 or latest. What could be the better way and upgrade procedure. Below is show version details and IOS upgrade to latest.
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Software Version 7.2(4)Device Manager Version 5.2(4) Compiled on Sun 06-Apr-08 13:39 by buildersSystem image file is "disk0:/asa724-k8.bin"Config file at boot was "startup-config"
IGN-ASA-1 up 45 days 17 hoursfailover cluster up 45 days 17 hours Hardware: ASA5520, 512 MB RAM, CPU Pentium 4 Celeron 2000 MHzInternal ATA Compact Flash, 256MBSlot 1: ATA Compact Flash, 512MBBIOS Flash M50FW080 @ 0xffe00000, 1024KB
We have 2 ASA 5520s in active/standy. We run IOS 8.2(5)24 and I wondered if I need to upgrade as I see the versions have gone to 8.4 and beyond! We are not getting any issues and I'm aware of the difficult migration from 8.2 to 8.4 etc due to the NAT change.
I have a couple of ASA5520 and ASA5550, and I wanted to know if it is worth it to upgrade the software from 8.2(4) to 8.2(5)? Because of the RAM I cannot upgrade to 8.3 for now.
I upgraded a pair of ASA 5520s from ASA 8.3 to ASA 8.4(4) this week and now my DMZ hosts cannot reliably communicate with eachother. I have a DMZ network of 10.20.20.16/28 configured. 10.20.20.17 is the ASA/Gateway and 10.20.20.19 is one host and 10.20.20.20 is another host. These two hosts had no problem communicating with eachother before the upgrade. Now, they usually cannot communicate with eachother. Occasionally they can communicate, but only for a few minutes. What is strange is I never had any access lists for these hosts to talk with eachother before the upgrade (because their traffic to eachother should have never reached the firewall) but now I needed to create an access list on the DMZ interface allowing these two hosts to talk. ICMP works fine, but only if the ACL is in place. TCP rarely works.
I need to upgrade the ASA 5520 from OS 8.2(5)26 to 8.2(5)33. the ASA only has 64M of flash. I have a 256M flash card. What are the steps to upgrade the flash? I am not sure how it will boot up because the new flash will be blank?
I have been asked to look at upgrading two 5520 ASA configured in a HA pair Active/Standby, from version 7.2(4) to version 8.3(1) to bring it in line with some other ASA firewalls in the organisation.
My question is can I simply upgrade straight from 7.2(4) to 8.3(1) or will I have to step the upgrade from 7.2(4) => 8.2(x) => 8.3(1)
Having read a few articles on the forums and the release notes I think I should be able to go from 7.2(4) => 8.3(1) .
The second part of my query is around the upgrade itself, having researched this a little there seems to be various views on how to go about upgrading a HA pair and I cannot find anything specific on the website.
The approach I am thinking of is simply as follows;
- upload images onto both firewalls in the HA pair - On the standby from the CLI clear configure boot
last night we tried to upgrade our cluster (2x ASA5520) from 8.0(4) to 8.2(3) and failed miserably.
1. Both units got the new image, but when we reloaded the secondary unit then we got the following strange message:
"Mate's license (10GE I/O Enabled) is not compatible with my license (10GE I/O Disabled). Fail over will be disabled."
After this message fail over was not there anymore and both units became active (!!!) which killed everything. Of course ASA5520 doesn't have 10GE and we have exactly the same units. What could be the problem here? Currently we run with a single unit with 8.2(3) and the secondary unit is switched off.
2. After the upgrade we cannot connect with multiple VPN sessions from the same client, this gets logged:
"Multiple sessions per tunnel are not supported"
This was working just fine with 8.0(4) and doesn't work with 8.2(3). Do we have to update something in the config or what is causing this? If you ask why we went with 8.2(3) instead of 8.2(5) then the answer is because we were testing that for several month in our secondary data center, but unfortunately only on a single ASA and not on a cluster. We couldn't go higher due to the 512MB RAM we have in all units. And we had to upgrade, because we had crashes with 8.0(4) which was working fine for a long-long time.
I was trying to upgrade from 8.3.1 to 8.3.2. but I am unable to copy via tftp to the ASA flash or disk0:
ASA5520# copy tftp: flash: Address or name of remote host []? 10.88.127.153 Source filename []? asa831-k8.bin Destination filename [asa831-k8.bin]?
[code]....
Half way thru writing to the disk, it goes for a reboot. There is more than enought space on the disk0. I tried copying via a Compact Flash, but the ASA is not detecting the Compact Flash (which I thinks should be disk1). I tried copying a asdm file, even that also went for a reboot.I am stuck now, unable to upgrade
I need to upgrade the flash memory of the ASA 5520 from 256Mb to 512Mb. As far as I realized the built-in flash memory called system compact flash and there is also an empty slot which it is possible to install a user flash.
What is the difference between user and system compact flash? and for upgrade can I just insert the user compact flash or do I need to upgrade the system compact flash? Where can I find the part number for each type?
I have asa 5520 k8 model presently i am running with IOS version 8.0(4) i am upgrading to 8.2(5) is ? any license required from Cisco to upgrade to this IOS, and also let me know how many site to site vpn can be configure on this device.
Licensed features for this platform: Maximum Physical Interfaces : Unlimited Maximum VLANs : 150 Inside Hosts : Unlimited Failover : Active/Active [code]...
This platform has an ASA 5520 VPN Plus license. Serial Number: JMX1051K2S5.
I have a project to upgrade an ASA 5520 to 9.1.x, then add another ASA for failover. What will be the correct way ?
I had the 2 Gb memory.
I have rewritten all nat statements (during my other 8.2 to 8.3 or 8.4 upgrade project, the nat conversion was catastrophic, so I rewrite all now).
Can I upgrade directly to v9 ? Or 8.2 -> 8.4 -> 9.1 ?
I think to :
- inject actual config in the new ASA in 8.2 - remove nat statement - upgrade to 8.4 - configure new nat - upgrade to 9 - connect the new ASA to the network and deconnect the other ASA - test - upgrade old ASA to 8.4 or 9 directly ? - configure failover
I am going to be updating the IOS on our Cisco ASA 5520 from verion 7.0(8) to 8.2(5). I am also going to setup AnyConnect. Are there any major changes in the 2 IOS versions that I need to be aware of or will the config work in either version? Also, we are currently using the Cisco VPN Client to connect to our network. Will that still work after the upgrade?
We upgraded and re-configured two existing ASA5520 platforms in order to provide an SSL VPN solution for one of our customers.
The customer opted to deploy AnyConnect Essentials the functionality / features they required for day one were catered for in the Essentials license and budget constraints meant Premium licensing could not be included in the original deployment.
The licenses added to the system were: L-ASA-AC-E-5520= AnyConnect Essentials VPN License - ASA 5520 (750 Users) ASA-AC-M-5520 AnyConnect Mobile - ASA 5520 (req. Essentials or Premium)
The customer is now seeing a growing number of mobile devices and wishes to support the BYOD culture growing within the business; as a result we now need to use features available in AnyConnect Premium. I am aware from reading the following document [URL] that AnyConnect Essentials and Premium licenses cannot co-exist on an ASA; I need to ensure we purchase the appropriate upgrade for the customer.
Is there an SKU to upgrade / migrate an existing Essentials deployment to Premium? I've reviewed the licensing guide and price list but cannot find a method which enables this transition.
I have to migrate two Cat6K series switches in a Data center to the new Cisco 6509 Series switches with no downtime. i know there are few threads on the same topic but none of them discuss about the downtime.The two Old Cat6K series switches are working in HSRP redundant mode. All access/Dist switches are dual homed to these two switches in downlink direction. In the uplink direction a router is dual homed to both Switches. Now my requirement is to completely migrate the configuration from the old switches to the new one in VSS mode without any downtime. Already VTP server is running on of the old switches so VLAN migration is not an issue. I will update the network diagram in few hours .As per now i am going to follow these steps:
1. Remove active links from switch 1 and shut it down 2. Monitor network and traffic impact on switch 2 3. Install the new 6509 switch along with switch 2 (VSS config already done in Staging) 4. Config HSRP and make it standby 5. Connect all removed links back to new switch 6. Remove old switch 2 and monitor network 7. Connect new switch with VSS config 8. Connect the two new switches together in VSS and move virtual IP to SVI.
During last step i think i will face some minor packet drops.
I'm trying to find out what is the minimum downtime for a Cisco 2800 series LAN interface configured as DHCP client, in order to initiate a new DHCP discover. How much time does it need to take for the Cisco to "sense" the phy disconnection ?
I have a 5K with 5 downstream 3560's. I now have a new 5k that I would like to add to the existing 5K as a HA peer. What is the best way to accomplish this with the least amount of downtime for the downstream switches.On the 3560's, i plan setting up port-channels once HA is setup on the 5k's.
I have seen conflicting information regarding downtime for this upgrade process and still have questions after reading URL. In this scenario, we have a VSS with one SUP in each chassis.
Are the chassis or modules rebooted one at a time? For instance, if I issue an "issu loadversion", will this just load the code on the SUP in the standby chassis, or will it load the code on the modules as well? If it does load the code on the modules, then I will have to wait the longest time from the "show issue outage slot all" before issuing a "issu runversion", correct?
Also, what outage times have people seeen on modules that support pre-loading? I have not been able to find any documented information on this other than it is faster, and the link referenced above still shows a 5 minutes outage for a warm reset on one of the modules.
We were using ASA-5520-K9 with ASA-SSM-AIP-20-K9 but recently found some hardware problem in our running ASA. Now cisco want to replace with ASA-5520-K8.
We are using the newest release of AD Agent (1.0.0.32.1, built 598). The ASA Firewalls 5520 are having the software release 8.4(3)8 installed.When somebody tries to connect thru the Identity based firewalls from a citrix published desktop environment (PDI) the connection is not possible. Checking the ip-of-user mapping on the firewalls (show user-identity ip-of-user USERNAME) mostly doesn't show the mapping of the USERNAME and the PDI the user is logged in. The user-of-ip mapping of the PDIs IP-address shows mostly other users, which then are used to authenticate the acces thru the firewalls.
What is interesting, that on the AD Agent using "adacfg.exe cache list | find /i "USERNAME"" i can't see the PDIs IP-address neither because it is mapped to another user.Is Citrix Published Desktop environment supported to connect thru Identity based Firewalls? How AD Agent, Domain Controllers and Firewalls are working together? On the firewalls with "show user-identity ad-agent we see, the following:
Why Cisco does use 1645 and 1646 and not 1812 and 1813?The Listening Port is used for what purpose? we tried the AD Agent modes full- download and on-demand with the same effect.
