Cisco Catalyst Center Upgrade Guide

Factors that affect the upgrade

Updated: April 3, 2026

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Overview

Download times for upgrade
Connection throttling
Proxy and firewall
TLS intercept proxy
Antimalware

Overview

Explains the minimum internet speed and bandwidth requirements for the software release download.

Download times for upgrade

The download time for the Catalyst Center software upgrade, which is approximately 40 GB in size, depends on your internet bandwidth. The following table provides download time estimates for various common bandwidth speeds.

Note

These estimates are based on ideal conditions. Factors such as network congestion and connection stability can affect actual download times.

Table 1. Upgrade download times
Bandwidth (in megabits per second)	Estimated download time
25 Mbps	3 hours, 38 minutes
50 Mbps	1 hour, 49 minutes
100 Mbps	54 minutes
200 Mbps	27 minutes

Connection throttling

During the software upgrade process, many objects are downloaded. If a web security appliance limits connections based on criteria such as the total data transferred within a period or the number of concurrent connections, this throttling can interrupt the download process and may cause it to fail. To ensure a smooth software upgrade, configure exceptions for Catalyst Center traffic to prevent throttling.

Proxy and firewall

The proxy or firewall must allow the software management URLs that are listed in "Required internet URLs and fully qualified domain names" in the Cisco Catalyst Center Appliance Installation Guide's.

TLS intercept proxy

The TLS intercept proxy will disrupt the software download activity initiated by Catalyst Center if the TLS intercept proxy certificate is not installed on Catalyst Center. To add the TLS intercept proxy certificate, refer to "Upload an SSL intercept proxy certificate" in the Cisco Catalyst Center Administrator Guide.

Antimalware

The Catalyst Center software management system retrieves files from the Cisco connected catalog server and Docker images from a remote Docker registry. To prevent interruptions and failures in the software download process, exclude these compressed file formats from antimalware scans.

The following table provides application package data details.

Table 2. Application package data
Files	content-type	content-encoding	Notes
tar.gz	application/x-compressed	gzip	Commonly used for compressed archives. Also seen as application/x-gzip or application/x-compressed.
.json	application/json	None	Text-based format for representing structured data. Typically UTF-8 encoded.

The following table provides Docker image details.

Table 3. Docker images
Component	File extension	content-type	content-encoding
Docker image layers	.tar.gz	application/gzip	gzip
Docker image manifest	.json	application/json	None
Docker configuration object	.json	application/json	None
YAML configuration	.yaml/yml	text/yaml or application/x-yam	None
Docker image archive	.tar or .tar.gz	application/x-tar or application/gzip	None or gzip

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