We are sharing our experience in upgrading to CUCM 14. We had encountered some issues and hope that going through this may help others avoid these.
As always, read the release notes for the new version and confirm all the prerequisites are fulfilled. Go through all new features and changes from the previous version to ensure you don’t have a surprise of our life after upgrade. Go through the compatibility matrix and ensure you are on required versions for other UC components and upgrade if not on the recommended version:
Let’s start with our experience. We upgraded CER followed by an upgrade to CUC pair prior to upgrading CUCM to 14SU2. CUC and CER upgrade to 14SU2 was straightforward and no different experience than any previous upgrade. CUCM upgrade was, however, a totally different experience. Most of this was related to the new cluster-wise upgrade that 12.5 includes. Our MGCP voice gateways were already of the recommended version, so we had nothing to worry about this part.
We upgrade all phones prior to the upgrade to make this process a little easy.
Main guiding document we used:
- Run
ciscocm.enable-sha512sum-2021-signing-key-v1.0.cop.sgnon all nodes if not done already. - Run pre-upgrade COP file on all the nodes starting with Pub node followed by all SUB nodes. PUB node had space issues, and we used
ciscocm.free_common_space_v1.9.k4.cop.sha512to free up some space. This cleans up the space but will delete the inactive version which was not an issue with this. - Now start the upgrade using the cluster-wide upgrade option (new in CUCM 12.5) -
utils system upgrade cluster initiate.
This was the command line response:
Processing the cluster wide download...
CUCMPUB Processing download request
CUCMSUB Processing download request
CUCMPUB Downloading..0Mb of 4407Mb
CUCMSUB Downloading..966Mb of 4407Mb
CUCMPUB Downloading..3983Mb of 4407Mb
CUCMSUB Checksumming the file...
CUCMPUB Checksumming the file...
CUCMSUB Checksumming the file...
CUCMPUB Download complete
CUCMSUB Download complete
Cluster wide Download complete and Install started
Node Role Step Description Historical Time Elapsed Time
---- ---- ---- ----------- ---------------- ------------
CMPUB CUCM Publisher 9/22 ucplatformInstall
CMSUB CUCM Subscriber 11/22 ucplatform_saml_ssoInstal
Cluster - Overall cluster progress 03:37:14
Node Role Step Description Historical Time Elapsed Time
---- ---- ---- ----------- ---------------- ------------
CMPUB CUCM Publisher - started - -
CMSUB CUCM Subscriber - started - -
Cluster - - Overall cluster progress - -
Node Role Step Description Historical Time Elapsed Time
---- ---- ---- ----------- ---------------- ------------
CMPUB CUCM Publisher 3/22 setup 00:01:15 00:01:19
CMSUBT CUCM Subscriber 4/22 verify 00:00:47 00:00:02
Cluster - - Overall cluster progress 03:37:14 00:01:22 This didn’t work for us very well. It took about 30 min to just fail on us indicating it failed to download on sub nodes. Don’t panic if this happens to you too. Just cancel the upgrade on each node (starting with PUB) using utils system upgrade cancel. Reboot all nodes and do the old fashion way – upgrade individual nodes starting with PUB. This is the only issue we hit during upgrade.
- Once you have upgraded all nodes, its time to switch version. Do this on PUB, wait for all service to come back up and do SUB nodes in a way that works for you. We did in groups to not lose phones at any time using failover CM group
- Now, its time to do post upgrade COP file, check enterprise params and other system settings as they might have changed during upgrade like TFTP serving settings
- Upgrade took 3 hrs for PUB upgrade, 2 hours for SUB node. Switch version was really fast as compared to previous versions- 10 to 15 min