A few months ago, Bill Bell wrote a blog titled “Cisco UC Application Upgrade – The CLI Method“. His intent was to outline some issues he experienced with a few revisions of CUCM 6x and was forced to do a CUCM upgrade via the CLI. For specifics on what things looked like then, I refer you to Bill’s article. Today, I am going to describe how you can perform an upgrade of a CUCM 7x server via the CLI and SFTP. Unlike the CUCM 6x experience, it’s almost the same as using the web interface.
1. Start things off by logging into the console with the platform administrator account (or its equivalent).
2. At the command prompt, type “utils system upgrade initiate”
3. The system then will prompt you with the following choices:
– (1) Remote Filesystem
– (2) DVD/CD
– (q) Quit
4. The UC team at NetCraftsmen relies on SFTP quite often, so I’ll demonstrate the “Remote Filesystem” approach. Select option 1.
5. The system prompts you for the Directory. This is where the upgrade file is located on your SFTP server.
– Ex: home/administrator
– Remember to use the correct syntax for the slashes (/)
6. The system prompts you for the User Name. This is the user with rights to the SFTP directory you need to access.
– Ex: sftpuser
7. The system prompts you for the Password. This completes the authentication portion of the SFTP transfer.
– Ex: Password
8. Next, you’ll be asked to verify the protocol you’d like to use for the transfer.
– (1) SFTP
– (2) FTP
– (q) Quit
9. In our case, we select SFTP. The server will then check for valid upgrade files and displays a message stating the same. “Checking for valid upgrade files, please wait….” When the system finds valid upgrade files, they are displayed (there may be various files on your SFTP server) for you to choose from.
Once you make your selection, the system will begin to pull the file via SFTP. Unlike the CLI method in 6x, you get file transfer status indication in CUCM 7x via CLI just like you do via web. At this point, it’s a waiting game for the file to be downloaded to the server, have check sum verified, and etc. Assuming there are no issues with the upgrade file, the system will ask you to verify if you you’d like to switch partitions after upgrade or not (you can simply say yes or no). All in all, it’s very similar to the web interface. However, after having done a couple upgrades in this manner…I’m starting to prefer it over the web interface. Why? Avoidance of hung/stale web sessions.