Experience on upgrading a Spoke to a stable rel. candidate

[rwiesmann]

I have a setup with a hub and about 25 spoke site (Auto-VPN). On the hub site i use a MX84, for the spoke

site I use MX 67.

Now I need to upgrade one spoke site to the stable rel. candidate version (15.52), because of a needed function.

All the other MX's will stay on 14.53.

Now, does anyone have experience with a setup where not all the sites do not have the same version?

Interested in if VPN will work fine, any potential problems...

[KarstenI]

This ism exactly what I am running with some customers.

Because of site-specific implementations for some sites I wanted to use the NO-NAT feature. Only these networks are configured for release-candidate (and some time ago "beta") while all other sites and the hubs run the stable 14.x release.

[DarrenOC]

hi @rwiesmann - the mixed firmware setup will work fine.  We have a number of customers running this setup with no issued raised.

[cmr]

@rwiesmann we almost always run mixed versions (though mainly within a major version) and only recently for the first time in over a year did we have the same versions for about a month.  We did have one issue with a 16.4 spoke and 15.42 hubs/other spokes that appeared a couple of weeks after upgrading.  But that's it.

[rwiesmann]

Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback @KarstenI,  @DarrenOC and @cmr  . 

[KRobert]

If you didn't need anymore verification already, we run a mixed versions all of the time. Our Hub is actually one of the last networks to be updated when running firmware updates within our infrastructure. This way the Hub can run on the most stable version without issue and then we can troubleshoot/test newer features on spokes that wont mess up the entire infrastructure and have to revert back.

Not to mention it is always fun to have a test/lab spoke that you can test all of the latest new beta features on 🙂

[Inderdeep]

As per i saw in most of the Big organizations, Compliance team come up to always go with the version code on N or N-1. I always keep my network N-1 as it takes time to have stability on the newer version. But here yes we can mix match the various firmware like N-1, N-2 whatever we have in our production environment. I agree with @KRobert to always check the newer version on the Spoke site first and once we have stability of the version put that version across for uniformity.

Regards
Inderdeep

[rwiesmann]

Thanks for all your feedback. This is why I like this community 💚 !

Spoke Site is now upgraded and all working as expected 😊