IOS XE 17.18.2 - stable enough to upgrade the org?

[Willrockhopper]

So IOS XE 17.18.2 is now listed as the latest stable release for Catalyst switches in the firmware upgrade portal on Meraki dashboard. What's odd is that the older 17.15.4.1 is listed as a stable release candidate. 

I'd love to understand if 17.18.2 is actually stable enough to upgrade our org to. At Cisco Live we'd heard there wouldn't be a stable version until March, so I was surprised to see it already listed as such.

We have a lot of Meraki and Catalyst hardware and this firmware release will unlock some huge benefits for us, but given downgrading is a very difficult and time consuming process, I'm hesitant to upgrade without understanding what issues we could face and how reliable/stable this release is.

[Mloraditch]

I believe it's only considered stable for the 9350 switches for which 17.18 is the minimum release. That may also include the other models that got cloud connectivity in 17.18 as well. It's in the other available versions category on my dashboard which is where special releases sometimes go that don't apply for all HW skus.

[Willrockhopper]

Interesting, that's a bit misleading then. We have 9300's and while it does show up in the "other available versions" category, there's a banner at the top which makes it sound like it applies to all C9000 series switches.

I'd be interested to hear from someone who works for Cisco what this actually means.

What's interesting is when we were having issues with something in 17.1.4 they advised us to upgrade to IOS XE even though at that point it was still in beta.

[Mloraditch]

It does apply as far as compatibility goes and can be tested on the existing lineup.

Supports recommendation was probably based on the specific issue you were having and knowing it was fixed OR the fact that the old CS firmware is basically not getting anything done to it at this point and the IOS-XE native firmware could either fix the issue or at least allow it to be investigated and fixed much more easily.

[rhbirkelund]

I have 17.18.2 running on 9300s in our lab. So far nothing extraordinary.