VC Firmware downgrade from VC 4.20 to VC 4.10 - VC Flex 10/10D module - restore issue

[chuckk281]

Syed had a question on how to use the "roll-back" feature in VC Manager.

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Need some guidance.

For a Customer, during a  support activity, recommendation was received to downgrade VC Firmware 4.20 to 4.10.

Prior to this configuration backup was captured and stored. Once downgrade was completed, restoring configuration backup (with checking Ignore firmware version tab for restore) is still giving error.

Appreciate if anyone can guide or advise. Case is logged with support as well. Thank You.

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The conversation.

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From Mark:

You can’t restore a VC 4.20 Backup on a VC 4.10 Domain.

You should have used the VCSU rollback feature to rollback from VC 4.20 to VC 4.10.

Ignore version allows you to restore a older config on a newer FW.

But I’m going to assume that is what support informed you of.

Reply from Syed:

Hi Mark,

Actually what we did was just do a firmware upgrade (downgrade) to v 4.10 after taking the backup and deleting the Domain prior to activity.

There is no clear information as to how to actually take the configuration back up for a roll back situation.

Or if you can advise about the converter utilities that I can use, there was also a mention of using the VCSU utility to be used for collecting configuration backup which is more aligned with the intended firmware revision (v 4.10).

So what we are now trying to try is use VCSU 1.8x or earlier to collect the configuration back up. this is just a hit n try.

As per the support we can give it a shot but if all else fails will have to re-create it all and that is a bit scary, since the environment is already in production and there are Hyper Visors and other hosts running using Virtual MAC addresses, which in turn is powering up the VDI solution and if we are not able to replicate/provide same MAC address to hosts, it would be a whole lot of different kind of problem.

Input from Vincent:

You don't take a backup yourself for a rollback. You just downgrade the firmware to the firmware version that was in-use before the last upgrade. So which firmware version was running on this domain before 4.20 ? Was it 4.10 or something else ? If something else you cannot perform a rollback to 4.10, only to that something else.

Now that you have a deleted domain, it's too late to take any backup.

And from Mark:

During the firmware upgrade, a copy of the “Configuration” is stored on the module. It is stored in Flash (images/archive). If at some point you decided to “rollback” to that previous version of firmware, that “Configuration” will be re-applied after the downgrade. This feature was implemented so that if a customer made a mistake and didn’t want to update the firmware, they could easily rollback without losing the Domain settings.

So instead of deleting domain, downgrading firmware and then restoring a backup config file manually, the Rollback process does it for you. It downgrades the firmware as long as you are going back to the version you update from and then restores the configuration file it stored in images/archive back to vcmConfig.tgz and puts the confuration back to where it was before updating.

No, whoever recommended collecting using VCSU 1.8x or earlier doesn’t understand that the collection of the backup config file is the same between all versions of VCSU.

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Comments?