Hello, in today's session, we will cover the software upgrade process for the Cisco Secure Firewall solution. During today's session, we will quickly discuss.00:05Some reasons that justify upgrading the Cisco secure Firewall software, understanding the software upgrade process, exemplifying the requirements and steps involved, and finally presenting a quick demonstration of how the upgrade process occurs.00:19For the FMC and FGD platforms. Let's start by talking about some business objectives that require a software upgrade, not forgetting that there are technical reasons involved such as bug fixes, the addition of new functionalities, and operational and performance involved.00:37With this, there are some benefits we could already list here that are related to challenges faced by customers. Among these challenges, we have obtaining visibility of the environment and control capability thus allowing better understanding of what is happening in your network.00:59And enabling more effective actions. Achieving simplified management of the environment with reduced operational costs, facilitating more flexible actions or changing and monitoring the environment regardless of.01:17Of the physical or virtualized platform. Lastly, enabling integration with other solutions to achieve broader visibility and security for faster threat response. Now moving on to the upgrade process to.01:32To understand how it can be carried out. For the upgrade process, there are activities and steps that need to be performed to achieve the best results. A detailed list of these steps can be found in the release notes for the given version that you are upgrading to.01:49Here is a list of steps to follow as a reference. Firstly, check the upgrade path, identifying the compatibility of the FMC, FTD, and FXOS software. Next.02:08Review notices and guidelines on how to perform the software upgrade for your appliances. Next, download the software and upload it to your FMC and start the readiness check to evaluate the upgrade.02:23Verify device communication and integrity, backup configurations and event data, check upgrade times and disk space requirements, plan the execution of update activities.02:41And post upgrade health validations, and finally schedule a maintenance window with additional time to handle unforeseen issues. Please note that these steps are merely a reference and a detailed strategy should be devised.02:58From the release notes for your reversion and platform and factored into your maintenance window strategy before the maintenance window itself. As an example of checks.03:14That we need to perform before an upgrade, we have the following points to observe. Supported hardware for the target version of the upgrade, this verification is important because depending on the platform and model used.03:29We may need to upgrade not only the FMC and FTD software, but also the FXOS version. Supported virtual environments, it maybe necessary to adjust memory, CPU, and storage configurations.03:45As well as the upgrade method and corresponding software image for the upgrade. Management is also an important factor to consider, which can be centralized via the FMC or local on the appliance via FDA. As the upgrade method may change with steps and files involved.04:02In the process. Compatibility with other solutions is important to maintain stable and operational integration. Otherwise, it will also be necessary to review the software version compatibility of the integrated platforms.04:22Now let's move on to the demonstration of the upgrade process. While the upgrade procedure is similar across different software versions, it is worth noting that this is done in a lab setting. Thus we will see an accelerated process.04:40The times will be longer in your secure firewall program. For this demonstration, we'll be upgrading a virtual FMC, any virtual FTD appliance. It is important to note that the current suggested release is version 742.04:55Which is a version I have in my lab? For demonstration purposes, we will be upgrading this FMC and FTD to version seven.six. Okay, so the 1st thing we want to do is log into our FMC.05:15You can see that I'm already logged in to mine. This is the dashboard. Remember that this is a lab, so there's actually NO live traffic flowing through here. All of the steps and buttons that we need are gonna be in the upgrade page. A quick note, if you are on a.05:31Earlier version, your page may look slightly different. However, the steps and processes will be the same or similar to just some of the buttons may have a slightly different name, so do keep that in mind.05:50So what we're gonna do is we're gonna come up here to the cogwheel or the system settings button. You'll see it next to your help indicator, and then we're gonna come down to product upgrades. Yours maybe something slightly different.06:07Upgrades or software upgrades or something like this.06:23On this page, we will, do all of our upgrade activities. So as part of your pre checklist, pre upgrade checklist, you would have downloaded the target software and uploaded.06:43It to your FMC on this page. You can see that I've already gone ahead and uploaded the software versions that I'm going to be upgrading to, and you can see one here for my FMC and my virtual FTD. Again, if your audience different version, yours may look.06:58Likely different. So we're gonna click upgrade, and then we will kick off our upgrade process.07:16Now, because I'm upgrading both, the system knows that the FMC has to be upgraded before the FTD does, this is something that important to note in your upgrade check process and is illustrated.07:32In the release notes for you version. So we're gonna click next and we're gonna go ahead and run our readiness check, ok? So again, the readiness check will do a couple checks.07:48On the devices, the FMC and the firewall, to make sure that it is ready to be upgraded. Now this can take a bit of time, and so for the sake of the video, I'm going to speed this part, alright and once you pass your readiness.08:03Then we can move on to the actual one.08:23If this did fail, it would show you where it failed or give you kind of some notes and then we will go back and check on whatever was a problem. So we're gonna click next. And now we're going to start the actual upgrade process. Again, we're gonna upgrade the.08:25FMC 1st and then upgrade the fgds we'.08:45Come back here to to do this process. So to kick it off, we're gonna click upgrade. We're gonna confirm. And then this would be a good time to either refill.08:50Or a grab a cup of coffee because this will take a bit. However, the magical power of editing, I'm gonna speed past this. During the FMC upgrade process, the FMC will restart services and reboot in order to complete the.09:08Upgrade. And so this may sort of kick you out of the upgrade thing that you were in previously. Don't worry, you can log back in and when you log in, it will take you to this page where you get to have a sort of upgrade status check as the upgrade is going on.09:28Do note that you can't make any changes or utilize the system in any way while the upgrade is running, this is purely for visualization purposes only, and just to let you know when the upgrade is finished. Alright.09:46Once your FMC has finished up on rebooting, you'll log back in, and you'll have to accept another EULA agreement and that you should be brought into the dashboard. You may have a pop up for like the what's new stuff.10:02For your version that you upgraded to. And that is the upgrade for the FMC. Nice and simple. Now we'll go ahead and do another upgrade, but this time for the firewall itself, then you'll see it from the FMC perspective. A very important step to make sure that we don't forget.10:18Is to deploy changes. Every time we do an FMC upgrade, we have to deploy changes to the the ftds before we do anything on them. So you'll come up to deploy, you'll select your device that we want to push policy to.10:38And then we'll click deploy. We don't need to worry about any other changes, but we'll push those. You'll get this validation errors check. You click this, it'll just give you a note saying, hey, you're deploying for the 1st time after an FMC upgrade, we're changing a bunch of stuff just like.10:56SRU and different things like that. If you do this immediately after the FMC reboots, it's very likely that we're installing a new SRU or VDB, so you wanna wait for that to finish and then come back here and deploy. If you did this.11:16A little bit of time after and it's likely finished, then you'll come in here and press deploy and you want these messages. So I'm gonna skip past once my FMC is done, installing everything else and then deploy these changes so we can kick off.11:35The upgrade. Alright, my FMC has finished installing the other packages. So we're gonna come up here, deploy select our device. We're gonna click our validation warning, and this is just saying, hey.11:52Just so you know, and then you'll click deploy advanced, and then this will take us to the advanced deploy page. We'll select our device, we'll click deploy, and then we can give any notes.12:11And then click deploy one more time. This is where we can see the validation warning and then accept it. And then we'll kick off our deployed. Do note that the FMC can be used.12:29During any of these processes where there's deploying changes or upgrades to the FTD. So now that my FTD has finished its policy deployed successfully, we can go ahead and upgrade it. So again, we're gonna go back to system.12:47Product upgrades, we're gonna click upgrade, so as you can see, we'll have the threat defense upgrade this time, as it was the only available upgrade on our system. And you can see we can choose the version.13:05That you want to go to depending on the files that we have uploaded, the devices in question, and, I only have the one in my particular case, and we'll go ahead and kick off the upgrade. So I'm gonna select my device here. We're gonna add it to the selection of the devices that.13:25Want to upgrade to save things over here. And then we have a couple of buttons, right? So, this copy upgrade package button, this will move the upgrade file from the FMC.13:45Down to the FTD, so we're gonna click this and confirm, this is the version that we want. This will take a bit of time depending on the network between the FMC and the firewall.14:01And I'm gonna skip past this button. All right, so the copy is done. We'll see the next button hits on left. From here, we're going to run our readiness check.14:17And you'll have to do this in order to validate and upgrade, so we'll click this and this will take a bit of time, just like you did for the FMC. I'll be it slightly shorter, and so I'm gonna skip past this once this has finished.14:36So after it has run its compatibility check, you'll see that it'll pass, and you'll have, you know, one device or however many devices you're upgrading, done here, and then we can go ahead and click next and kick off the upgrade. So start the upgrade, I'm gonna go ahead and click the start upgrade button.14:54Here, we're gonna confirm the upgrade, and then we can monitor the status of the upgrade while we just do it. I'm gonna go ahead and speed past this part of the upgrade and come back once it's finished.15:14Alright, and now the firewall upgrade, has done and the reboot went successfully, so you'll see completed here and any of the changes. And so just like with the FMC, there's gonna be some.15:34Other packages that may need to update or some other pushes, and then don't forget your policy deployed. That concludes the Cisco secured Firewall upgrade process. Thank you for watching.15:51
