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Cisco ACI fabric and a "recommended" software version


Prior to Cisco I had a gig as a Systems Engineer at a Gold partner and one of the frequent tasks were software upgrades. Every now and then I would ask TAC for SW recommendation. Now, as a CSE myself, I figured I can't recommend customers any software version because there is not “one fits all” release available (even if I really want to help). I have a lot of tickets (most of them are configuration assistance though) with different software releases and I am not aware of all the issues (defects) present in a particular SW release. If a software release is published on CCO and not deferred, Cisco supports this release. As a side note, Cisco AS has what is called “Bug scrub”, where they can provide an overview of known defects pertained to a particular setup.
How to understand the SW release naming:

There are two main images for ACI fabric:

1. There is an ACI image for an APIC controller with the name aci-apic-dk9.3.2.1m.iso where 3.2.1m is SW version;

2. There is a switch image for leaves and spines with the name aci-n9000-dk9.13.2.1m.bin where 13.2.1m is SW version;

Let’s take a look at the following example:

SW release number: 3.2.1m
3.2 – a number of a major release
1m - a number of a maintenance release

Maintenance releases don’t contain major code changes and new features, the main objective of these is defect fixing.

Long live and short lived release: the difference between those is TAC support duration:
Long Lived releases:  up to 18 months
Short Lived releases: ~6 months 

Long Lived releases are recommended for setups that won’t be upgraded frequently

Currently available long lived releases: 

2.1(x)
2.2(x)
3.2(x)

All official information about recommended versions can be found on CCO in Release Notes:

Recommended Cisco APIC and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series ACI-Mode Switches Releases
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/recommended-release/b_Recommended_Cisco_ACI_Releases.html

A couple of tips before upgrading your ACI fabric:


apic1# cd /firmware/fwrepos/fwrepo
a8661788d13a57f046567c6c5b8895ab aci-apic-dk9.3.2.1l.bin

 

  •       Make a screenshot of faults, present in your fabric or save "moquery -c faultInst > /data/techsupport/faults_before_an_upgrade.txt" output to a file. Then you can compare a status of your fabric with its original state (do the same for system health);
  •       After the APIC upgrade wait until the cluster is fully fit and compare it to #4;
  •       Don't upgrade leaves in VPC pairs simultaneously (as of 3.x they won’t upgrade together anyway!), however, as a best practice, don't put them in the same maintenance group.
 

Here are a few basic commands to verify ACI fabric after an upgrade:

APIC:
show controller
acidiag avread
acidiag rvread
acidiag fnvread
moquery -c faultInst
show cores
show firmware upgrade status
show firmware upgrade status detail
show health history

Leaf/Spine:
show version
show module
acidiag fnvread
show vpc
show port-channel summary
show vrf
show ip route vrf  VRF_NAME
iping -V VRF_NAME x.x.x.x          where x.x.x.x is ip of a target endpoint


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