Best practice Stage Upgrade (small timeslot)

[MarcP]

Hi all,

never used the staged upgrade so far, only scheduled upgrade in general.

Wondering whats the best way to to it.

Got 2 Corestacks and around 40 access switches.

My plan was to start with access switche (10am) then Core2-stack (10.30am) and Core1-stack (11am)

Is this realistic, using the staged upgrade?

Only got 1,5-2h timeslot to upgrade all.

Or is it better to Upgrade all together, as the swtiches wait until all switches downloaded its firmware / after 20minutes ?

Regards

Marc

[MarcP]

as there is enough time, maybe the all together option is the best?

I can schedule it and the firmware should be download before and then upgrade on time.

[alemabrahao]

Yes, it can work, but upgrading all switches together is often simpler and safer when the maintenance window is small, especially because Meraki pre‑downloads firmware and switches wait around 20 minutes before rebooting.

Meraki's staged upgrades are great when you have too many switches to upgrade in a single window, or
you have different allowable outage windows per group.

MS Firmware Upgrades - Cisco Meraki Documentation

[cmr]

Personally I follow your initial plan, start at edge and move in towards core.  With the window you have I think you would be okay, but if you think it is a bit tight then either do edge as phase 1 and then both cores as phase 2 (if a complete core outage isn't going to break some iSCSI or similar traffic), otherwise do edge and one core first if you are nervous about the time.

As @alemabrahao said, you can stage the upgrade over multiple maintenance windows, so edge first, a week or two later core 1 and again for core 2.

[BlakeRichardson]

I upgrade everything at once although I normally opt for doing it at 3am when then likelihood of end users being affected is limited.  

[PhilipDAth]

I used to do exactly that - now I do everything at once.

All switches download the firmware first, wait 20 minutes to ensure all other switches have finished downloading, and then apply the firmware.

https://documentation.meraki.com/Switching/MS_-_Switches/Product_Information/Compatibility_and_Firmw...