Upgrade to R80.20

[Nishad_Abooback]

Hello Friends,

I am managing the below checkpoint environment. I need some expert advice on how I can upgrade the entire environment to R80.20, basically I am looking for some good process/order, best practices and any known issues that can be expected.

Current environment:

Management sever 3150 running R80

Smartevent server 3150 running R80

Over 42 sites , consisting of 5600, 5400, 5200 , 5100 and 3200 security gateways running R77.30, few sites has HA and few are no-HA.

We  have almost all blades enabled from firewall,IPS, appcontrol,antibot,antivirus.

Highly appreciate the help.

Thanks,

Nishad

[Alessandro_Marr · Accepted solution]

Hello, 

Take a look on Migrate to R80.20 TechTalk‌

[PhoneBoy]

Did a minor edit to your post to include a link to the TechTalk

[Chris_Atkinson]

Some general advice in this regard...

Always start with upgrading your Management / SmartEvent and then move on to the gateways, perhaps in order of least importance (lowest risk site) as relevant to your organization.

Investigate the Central Deployment Tool (CDT) if you need a means of streamlining the process.

Always, always have multiple forms of backup available to you (and stored off box) to ensure that you have a viable rollback should it be required.

- backup

- migrate export (using current version & target version tools)

- snapshot

*Note: Pay special attention to the upgrade requirements / process for management if the new file system (xfs) benefits appeal to your environment.

[Nishad_Abooback]

Thank you , great piece of advice!

[Rodney_Hopkins2]

Practice, practice, practice.

Have an environment you can test the upgrade process in.

migrate export your management server and run that through the pre-upgrade verifier until you get all critical errors that will prevent a migration corrected.

Review the issues that are Recommended to be fixed as well for relevance and criticality to your environment and correct those as necessary.

Backup.

Know your rollback strategy.

Proceed carefully.

[Nishad_Abooback]

Thank you!