Solved: Best way to transfer an image to many switches

afsharki2 · ‎05-17-2017

Hello,

I was just curious how people normally transfer an image for an upgrade. I am going to upgrade about 100 or so 3850s, and was wondering what people think is the best way to transfer the images to the switches...I mean the fastest way. No security needed, I would just like to get the image there as fast as possible.

Thank you

Joseph W. Doherty · ‎05-17-2017

The fastest method is using some kind of management package that can concurrently push images to multiple devices especially using some transfer protocol.

Without such a package, I've telnetted to each device, using about 10 concurrent telnet sessions. On each telnet session I manually pull the image from a server. To speed up the process, I pasted commands into the telnet sessions.

Last time I did something like this, by about the time I started the 5th copy, the first had finished. Then I just continue to round-robin subsequent devices. I have been able to update about 100 devices in about an hour. (Of course, much depends on the size of the image and your bandwidth to the devices.) With 100 devices, though, you really appreciate a package that can push for you.

If you're doing this on a LAN, tftp can be used, but across WANs, you don't want to use tftp.

BTW, for WANs, it also helps if the Cisco devices have been configured to optimize TCP. Then, the bottleneck is either the WAN bandwidth or the time to write to flash.

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Joseph W. Doherty · ‎05-17-2017

The fastest method is using some kind of management package that can concurrently push images to multiple devices especially using some transfer protocol.

Without such a package, I've telnetted to each device, using about 10 concurrent telnet sessions. On each telnet session I manually pull the image from a server. To speed up the process, I pasted commands into the telnet sessions.

Last time I did something like this, by about the time I started the 5th copy, the first had finished. Then I just continue to round-robin subsequent devices. I have been able to update about 100 devices in about an hour. (Of course, much depends on the size of the image and your bandwidth to the devices.) With 100 devices, though, you really appreciate a package that can push for you.

If you're doing this on a LAN, tftp can be used, but across WANs, you don't want to use tftp.

BTW, for WANs, it also helps if the Cisco devices have been configured to optimize TCP. Then, the bottleneck is either the WAN bandwidth or the time to write to flash.