Author: Valter Popeskic

For a shorter update procedure guide check abbreviated article: Short list of upgrade steps without extensive explanations “Cisco Catalyst 6880-X VSS ISSU Upgrade Steps“

Intro

Cisco spoiled us over the years with great and detailed documentation on each technology and hardware component they support. Still, I managed to find a part where documentation is not detailed enough to give you definite number of steps to get things done.

While preparing for software upgrade of Cisco Catalyst 6880-X VSS cluster I stumbled on one of the first examples of outdated and vague procedure for upgrade of Cisco device. Here is my successful ISSU (In-Service Software Upgrade) procedure which I done few days ago. I hope it will help you avoid sweating and hoping that you typed the right thing on a VSS cluster that should not go down at any point 🙂

I included an Acronym Guide at the bottom of the post to guide you trough VSS, ISSU, Cluster, and other mentioned abbreviation which are not described in details here

In my case the environment was Catalyst 6880-X and four 6800ia Fabric Extenders FEX. The same procedure is valid for more on for no FEX extenders.

Cisco Catalyst 6880-X VSS

Get the info on which IOS version is supported to be upgraded with ISSU

Not all IOS images can be upgraded to new IOS versions using In Service procedure to avoid network traffic downtime. In order to get things working, you need to get into Cisco docs and find ISSU supported upgrade matrix document.

This is a short version without comments and explanations for those that need to get things done quickly without reading through my extensive waffle.

For detailed update procedure with all the explanations check extended article: “ISSU Upgrade of Cisco Catalyst 6880-X VSS cluster and its four 6800ia FEX extenders“

Let’s start!

1. Get the info on which IOS version is supported to be upgraded with ISSU

Google for ISSU or EFSU IOS upgrade support or use this Cisco doc “SX_SY_EFSU_Compatibility_Matrix1” to select supported IOS for ISSU upgrade from your current version.

2. Upload IOS to both Chassis

copy ftp://admin:[email protected]/c6880x-adventerprisek9-mz.SPA.151-2.SY7.bin bootdisk:

and same for slavebootdisk:

This is a description on how to deploy a Juniper LAB of 8 vMX routers and making a simple topology in VMware vSphere environment. vMX is Juniper’s virtual production router so this could be the same procedure for deploying vMX device in production except different number of routers and their interconnection with vSwitch setup.

Two VMs interconnected with VLAN801 – making one Juniper vMX router

As you might have seen from my previous post, I’m trying to get into Juniper configuration lately. One of the things that I needed is to set up a simple lab running Juniper vMX machines with multicast forwarding enabled.

It was a simple lab experiment with few commands on each device. As it turns out, being a Cisco fellow, each of those commands presented a complicated googling routine until the thing finally started to work.

Most time I spent configuring Virtual Machines and boot them properly, after that Juniper Configuration Guides were enough to make fist lab scenarios.

Googling went somewhat like this:

• How to set up Juniper vMX on Vmware ESXi 6.0 and interconnect 8 instances of vMX?
• How to configure Vmware network and vSwitches to make this work?
• How to configure VCE and VPE vMX Control and Forwarding plane VM communication?
• How to configure interfaces and map them to VMware vSwitch interfaces?
• How to configure Juniper eth interfaces, OSPF, Multicast with PIM Sparse mode?
• Why this does not work from the first try? Do I need vMX Evaluation licence to do that?
• What for …. does ‘tunnel-services statement on one or more online FPC and PIC’ mean?

…so when it actually finally worked, I decided to share it so you can have one post that would describe it from start all the way to VLC Multicast streaming.

I’m fairly new to Juniper CLI. For one of my first tries, I decided to make my life difficult by starting with multicast configuration on virtual vMX routers running as VMs on VMware ESXi.

It took a lot of investigation about some part of this configuration specially the tunnel interface which you will see below. I decided to put it here all in one place with the explanation of every step because Juniper documentation tends to assume that you know more than me. If that is not the case, this short description is for you.

Here’s how the topology looks like. I have 8 routers making this topology with the plan to source multicast streams from right to left, from PC 10.10.99.11 towards PC 10.10.98.11

Configuration

If a computer on local LAN network is turned off and administrator needs to do some regular maintenance on it, he will need to use Wake-On-LAN (WoL) to power the system up remotely.

Of course, network devices need to be configured to enable that kind of “magic” packet forwarding.

NIC cards on machines need to support WoL for this to work, but we don’t bother with this here..

WoL is sending “magic packets” to computer NIC card in order to start the system up. NIC which supports WoL is still receiving power when PC is turned off. NIC then keeps listening on the network for the magic packet and if received it will initialise the system boot process and power up the PC.

Magic packet is specially crafted network directed broadcast packet typically sent with connectionless UDP, port 7.

You would usually have a WoL server somewhere on you network which will be used to source magic packets. If you send magic packets across network segments (between VLANs or from some remote subnet), last router in the path, one having client subnet locally connected, needs to be configured with directed broadcast. The first router on the path, router with server subnet locally connected, should have ip helper configured pointing to directed broadcast IP address (in our case 172.19.1.255).

In our example below, both ip helper and directed broadcast are configured on the same L3 device since this is the only router connecting two subnets.

Directed broadcast on Cisco devices is off by default since IOS 12.0 and needs to be configured on specific subnets where WoL will be needed.

You need directed broadcast because PC which needs to be woken up is asleep and while asleep it will not have an IP nor it will respond to ARP. Only way to get some packets to that PC without an ARP resolution is by using local subnet L2 broadcast.

Furthermore, we can surely assume that your PCs are connected to L2 Access Switch. That switch will not know to which port is the PC connected while that PC is asleep. Only a Layer 2 broadcast (and unknown unicast) will be sent out all ports on a switch.