You can find the steps at Cisco site to perform non-disruptive upgrade on MDS 9000 switches. I add some additional steps.
1) Read release notes and discuss with support to determine which version to upgrade. Then, download the correct firmware file. Supervisor 3 and supervisor 4 in MDS 9710 firmware files are different.
2) Confirm running config is applied to startup config
copy running-config startup-config
3) Copy running config to bootflash
copy running-config bootflash:$(SWITCHNAME)-$(TIMESTAMP).cfg
4) Backup config, existing kickstart and firmware to tftp. Other than startup config, I make sure I have a copy of the current version of kickstart and firmware in the TFTP server.
copy bootflash: tftp:
5) Save a copy of show tech-support detail. In case something goes wrong, support can compare the switch condition before and after upgrade.
6) confirm bootflash free space before uploading new firmware. I will delete firmware and kickstart file older than the current version.
dir bootflash:
dir bootflash://sup-standby/
7) upload image and kickstart files using tftp
copy tftp: bootflash:
8) Verify the MD5 checksum
show file bootflash:filename md5sum
9) Run the command below to see the impact of the upgrade.
show install all impact kickstart bootflash:kickstart.bin system bootflash:image.bin (check if upgrade is non-disruptive)
Run commands below for basic health check
show system redundancy status
show module
10) Confirm no TFTP / SFTP session (CSCvu52058)
In order to see if there are open file transfer sessions, you can run
show users | inc ssh | wc l
and
show processes | inc dcos_ssh | wc l
to compare the number of ssh users logged in and the number of sshd processes running.
If the values are different, you may have an open file transfer connection.
11) Run command below to see if the existing config incompatible with image.
show incompatibility system bootflash:image.bin
12) Run command below to start upgrade
install all kickstart bootflash:kickstart.bin system bootflash:image.bin
Once again, you see the impact of the upgrade.
It lists the current and target version of modules
Then, type y and enter to proceed the upgrade.
Wait for the switchover message
Login again thru putty. Now, the active director is module 6.
To show installation process. Run the command below.
show install all status
Once it shows "Install has been successful", run the command below to confirm new version of firmware is applied to the switch as expected.
show version
show module
