Reverting back an upgrade to R80.10 from R77.30

[Leandro_Nicolet]

Hi folks.

I'm in the middle of testing the upgrade steps required to get our R77.30 VSX Gateways from R77.30 to R80.10

We've already done the management side which is already on R80.10. I've tested upgrading a gateway (all be it in VMware) using vsx_util upgrade on the management side and cpuse on the gateway side which is all fine.

What i'm really struggling to find are procedures for rolling back if we need to, so my question is.... is it possible to uninstall or revert back to R77.30 on the gateway ?

[G_W_Albrecht]

Of course: in VMware, you can use a VM snapshot for that.

[Leandro_Nicolet]

I'm just using VMWare for testing. My real gateways run on Checkpoint appliances so was after a procedure of reverting the Checkpoint side of things.

[Daniel_Taney]

I personally have never had to do this, but I would imagine you'd be OK if you took GAiA Snapshots of your Management Servers and VSX Gateways and exported copies of them off the appliances. This way, if you need to roll back, you can revert the snapshots in GAIA. Worst case, if you have to rebuild, you can rebuild and import the snapshot. 

Like I said, I've never done this in practice, but it seems like the most straightforward way. Anyone can feel free to chime in and disagree...

Regardless, since it is VSX, having a good backup of your Management Server is way more important that having backups of the Gateways. You can always rebuild the Gateways from a clean image and use vsx_util reconfigure to re-provision the VSX config on the Gateway. 

[Leandro_Nicolet]

As far as I'm aware you can't snapshot VSX Gateways as the Web Gui is disabled. Unless there is another way of snapshotting ? Boot menu ? If one could restore from snapshot I would still be left with the management side on R80.10 for that particular gateway, but like you say I could snapshot the manager.

I'd be surprised if there isn't a way to revert back to R77.30 for VSX. 

[Leandro_Nicolet]

Answering myself, it looks as though I can run a snapshot from the CLI in VSX, so I'm good.

thanks for replying folks !

[Ryan_St__Germai]

I have only needed to revert to a snapshot once and I was forced to use the command line as the GUI was dead. Worked like a champ, just takes a while. 

[PhoneBoy]

Snapshots are always a good practice for rollback purposes.

If you get to a situation where you need to rollback, though, it would be useful to engage us so we can fix the underlying issue versus simply staying on R77.30.

[Martin_Peinsipp]

Hello!

I would like to dig out this threat, because I would like to know, if somebody knows, how long it might take, if i have to revert an appliance (23500) to a saved snapshot (vsx-gateway).

I need to know, if it might take very long (more than an hour).

Best regards

Martin