Upgrading Catalyst Center

Upgrading catalyst center is a relatively simple process provided with follow best practices and cover all prerequisites. 1st, we need to identify the release we will install and read the release notes to understand what is new.00:05What is fixed and if there are any caveats. Catalyst Center sits on the server, the server has its own firmware, we advise you to verify and upgrade the firmware if that is necessary. We highly recommend consulting software compatibility matrix to make sure that your network devices are supported and they have the.00:19Recommended iOS version for the new catalyst center release.00:39We should back up our catalyst center frequently both automation and assurance data, but it is vital to do it before an upgrade. We do not back up our data to transfer them to the new version, but to have the data available in the rare scenario where the upgrade fails and we need to re image the device.00:43To make sure that the system is ready for the upgrade, we execute the upgrade validation set. This will tell us if there are any issues, any warnings or any critical situations we need to take care of before we upgrade, so the upgrade itself does not fail.01:04All the above are not invasive catalyst center or our network, so far we have NO disruption at any of the services or the network itself. For the upgrade itself, it's strongly recommended to allocate a maintenance window and to open a proactive tag case in that rare scenario where the process.01:20Fails. Once the process starts, once, once the upgrade starts catalyst center will go into maintenance mode and will not be accessible, but the network will not be affected. At the end of the process. We should verify success of the upgrade.01:40And perform a new backup for the new environment. As for the upgrade itself, there are two options, the online upgrade and the offline or air gapped upgrade for systems that are not connected to the internet. Best practices apply to both options. We will briefly go through the online upgrade process.01:58Just feel free to contact us to get more info in any case.02:18So for the online upgrade, we go to menu, to system and to software management where we see the installed version and the available release. We click download to get all necessary files and we click install now to proceed with the upgrade. It will take some time during.02:24Which we cannot access catalyst center. Once it finishes, we have our system upgraded.02:43If for whatever reason we want to upgrade to a different release than the one shown, we click the respective link, we check our options, we select the release we prefer, and then we follow the same steps as in previous slide. When you go to software management page, you actually notice two.02:50Sections. The upper one is about the system. The lower is about applications.03:10If you have all applications installed, you get the message bottom right, you may have the option to install applications as shown in the top right screenshot, but it's up to you to select them. There is NO need to install everything if you do not intend to use them.03:15How to check if the upgrade was successful, we check the hierarchy, we check the image repository. In the inventory we verify all devices are reachable and managed. In the system three 60, we verify external integrations are healthy, and we run validation tests as we did before the upgrade.03:33Last step before we consider the process complete is to backup automation and assurance data in the new environment, even better if we schedule frequent backups to avoid losing data in case of a system failure. To conclude for a successful enter without, we should follow best practice.03:52This and the upgrade guides that Cisco provides for the target release version.04:12This was a teaser video. You can find more information in our community page for expert inside series where you can watch recordings of previous sessions on various topics around catalyst center, including how to upgrade and also register for upcoming events.04:18Feel free to send us an email and request a one on one session to discuss your systems upgrade and any concerns you may have around the process. Thank you for watching.04:35