Has the in-place R80.40 to R81.20 Gaia upgrade worked for anyone?

[mhurst]

Have tested in-place Gaia upgrade from R80.40 to R81.20 using Check_Point_R81.20_T634_Fresh_Install_and_Upgrade.tar on several systems, both gateways and management servers, and not once has it run successfully. All are open server, not appliances.

The package imports OK, the verify process says upgrade is possible, and then the upgrade fails silently at around 85% and the device gets automatically rolled back to R80.40. Well, management servers get rolled back, gateways have to be rebuilt from scratch as the rollback fails.

Found a log file that stops logging anything prior to the failures, so there is no useful information there.

This upgrade path is supported. The deployment agent is the latest version. There is enough disk space. The verification process succeeds. Am running "installer upgrade". Systems are all 64-bit. Am doing everything according to the documentation.

These failures occur even on brand-new clean R80.40 installs.

Am honestly wondering if this process has ever worked for anyone.

[G_W_Albrecht]

Yes it did.

[PhoneBoy]

If you're coming from R80.40, you might want to do this as an Advanced Migration.
This is because there are some changes to the installer to ensure disk partitions are properly aligned.
See: https://community.checkpoint.com/t5/Management/Gaia-partition-misalignment/m-p/160677 

[mhurst]

For our management servers i exported R80.40 config, did clean install of R81.20 and imported the old config. That all worked, for the most part. Is that what you mean by advanced migration?

Was hoping to minimise downtime during firewall upgrades by upgrading them in-place.

If there is an issue preventing in-place upgrade the package verify process should report that ideally.

[PhoneBoy]

Yes, that's what an Advanced Migration is (export/reinstall/import).

Changing the file system to xfs (done in R80.40) and changes to partitioning (new fdisk in R81.20) cannot be handled in place, but only through a clean install of the hardware.
Both of these changes can improve the performance of certain operations dramatically, which is why it is being suggested.
They are not considered blocking issues for an in-place upgrade.

[the_rock]

I did that many times, never had an issue.

Andy

[Bob_Zimmerman]

It may be worth trying an in-place upgrade to R81.10. It uses the same OS base as R80.40 (mostly, anyway), while R81.20 changes the bootloader to GRUB2.

Are your systems using ext3 or xfs? 'mount' should tell you.

[mhurst]

R80.40 devices are XFS.

[Bob_Zimmerman]

In general, yes, but are yours?

[mhurst]

Yes, i meant these specific devices are XFS.