topic Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA! in Firewall and Security Management

Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Raz_Zilberman — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:17:19 GMT

Hi All,

We’re excited to announce the early availability of Background Gateway Upgrade, a major step forward in simplifying Security Gateway upgrade operations — now available for testing by interested customers and partners!

What is it?

Background Gateway Upgrade introduces a new upgrade flow where the majority of the upgrade process is handled in the background, with no impact to gateway performance or traffic.

This new capability is currently available under a feature flag through a specific Deployment Agent version in CPUSE.

Customer Benefits

With Background Gateway Upgrade, you can:

Dramatically reduce downtime during major version upgrades or JumboHotfix installations
Simplify upgrade planning and execution
Minimize upgrade risk by pre-validating the upgrade environment
Improve operational continuity — users and traffic stay unaffected until reboot

We’re here to support you throughout the process and would love your feedback as we shape this into a standard capability for all customers!

Questions? Want to participate? Drop a comment below or contact me directly.

Thanks,
Raz

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Vincent_Bacher — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:25:52 GMT

Hi Raz,

Change management is quite a challenging topic in our organization.

That's why reducing risks and especially downtimes would be strong arguments in the change request process.
Could you share more details on how this new approach works? I'm really interested.

Best,
Vince

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

the_rock — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:27:08 GMT

Wow, that sounds AMAZING!

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Raz_Zilberman — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:41:27 GMT

Sure, let's have a quick call later this week? ping me in my email - razz@checkpoint.com and I will schedule a call.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Vincent_Bacher — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:30:17 GMT

Will be happy to contribute.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

the_rock — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:38:30 GMT

I would also be interested to test this in the lab, if possible.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

PhoneBoy — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:14:24 GMT

Looking forward to seeing this in action!

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Tom_Hinoue — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:20:27 GMT

Sounds great!

I'm curious if this can work backwards once the previous version is compatible to this feature.
It's not that I want to do a downgrade, but just wondering if we can uninstall a hotfix or revert to the previous version incase any issues occur.

Also, does this mean the policy package from previous version will be compatible even after major version upgrade?

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

the_rock — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:08:57 GMT

Super valid and logical point, Tom.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Raz_Zilberman — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:43:28 GMT

Sure, ping me at my email - razz@checkpoint.com , and I will schedule a call.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Phil_Pasquier — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:56:07 GMT

This looks like a revolution! Thank you for your efforts.

I'll drop you an email !

Cheers

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

the_rock — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:06:17 GMT

Hey Raz,

Just wanted to circle back on this...is there free demo people can check for this or would I still need to email you to organize a call?

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Magnus-Holmberg — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:37:45 GMT

Sounds great, is the plan to have this within the smartconsole?

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Bob_Zimmerman — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:50:01 GMT

I'm also very interested, and I just sent an email.

Based on how it's described above, it sounds to me like this is more or less how Apple upgrades/updates their operating systems now: create a new logical volume, unpack the upgrade/update there, run whatever tests, then set the bootloader to boot from it. It's a little more complicated than something like illumos' or FreeBSD's boot environments, but it can be used with older filesystems like XFS. If I'm right, it will involve heavy I/O (basically a free resource on a healthy firewall) and very little CPU or RAM consumption.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

the_rock — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:09:51 GMT

K, just emailed you.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

CheckPointerXL — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:39:12 GMT

logical volume is cloned and then the upgrade takes place? just to understand how custom files are preserved

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

emmap — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:44:22 GMT

As I understand it, our upgrades already work similarly to that. A new root partition is created in the 'upgrade_reserved' disk space, the software is installed and the config is copied over to that new partition. The old root partition is stored as the 'AutoSnapshot' rollback point, which is why it's uncompressed as compared to regular snapshots. I guess we have improved the procedure such that we don't have to stop processes on the running gateway to perform the config copy.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

emmap — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:46:08 GMT

I believe the Lightshots introduced in R82 can do this for us. Your system takes a lightshot at 3am every night to provide a rollback point. The most recent 5 automatic lightshot restore points are retained, along with the FCD restore point.

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

the_rock — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:48:00 GMT

Good to know!

Re: Background Gateway Upgrade – Now Available for EA!

Tom_Hinoue — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 03:59:37 GMT

Thanks for the follow up!
Can the restore using Lightshots be processed in the background to restore previous settings without any disruption?
This is what was I was wondering of the reverse of the new background upgrade feature. (background downgrade?)