how 2 upgrade cisco ios images on catalyst 3560 switches

2009-08-19T13:34:00.012-06:00

There are many reasons to upgrade the IOS software image on your cisco catalyst switch. Assuming you have made the decision to go ahead with it, here are some steps that have well worked for me. Let's look at how to upgrade IOS with and without Device Manager. Cisco has a very useful document that talks about many issues surrounding upgrading and supporting IOS image files on recent catalyst switches here.

First let perform this with Device Manager.

Connect to your switch via the console cable, then statically assign an ip address to your computers nic that is in a vlan assigned to the port on the switch you are connected to. Test connectivity from the console session by pinging the address you assigned to the computer…you can also reverse the ping to the vlan from the computer. Performing this step will eliminate a lot of potential connectivity problems before you attempt upgrading the IOS image.

Look at your flash to verify that you have enough free space to transfer the image by issuing the ‘dir flash:’ command. Assuming you do the next step is to TFTP the image to flash by issuing the command ‘copy tftp flash’. Follow the prompts for the remote TFTP server address, source and destination file name and wait patiently. In this case we will use a sample file name of c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3.tar.

Find out where the currently running IOS image is located by issuing the command ‘show boot’. Then delete this image and the directory with all of the HTML files for Device Manager. Delete these by issuing the following command ‘delete /force /recursive flash:c3560-ipbase-mz.122-46.SE’. Once this completes issue a ‘dir flash:’ and you should see the new tar file but no trace of the old IOS directory structure.

Next extract the new tar file with the command ‘archive download-sw flash:c3560-ipbase-tar.122-50.SE3.tar’…you should then see output similar to the following.

Extracting images from archive into flash...

c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3/ (directory)

extracting c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3/c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3.bin (9968993 bytes)

c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3/html/ (directory)

Many other directories will follow this until everything in the tar file has been extracted.

Upon completion you should see a message like this.

Installing (renaming): `flash:update/c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3' ->

`flash:c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3'

New software image installed in flash:c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3

All software images installed.

Issue a ‘show boot’ command to verify that the new IOS image is the one listed to boot from. Assuming that it is issue the command ‘write’ then ‘reload’ typically this setting is changed during the tar file extraction procedure. Assuming all went well your switch should now boot into the new image you just upgraded. Congratulations!

If you decide to NOT use Device Manager and just want to run the IOS image without it, the same procedure applies except that you will be TFTP’ing a BIN image NOT a TAR file. So in our example c3560-ipbase-tar.122-50.SE3.bin would be the file to TFTP to flash. Issue the ‘delete /force /recursive flash:c3560-ipbase-mz.122-46.SE’ command. TFTP the new bin file to flash. Set the boot path for the new image by issuing the command ‘boot system c3560-ipbase-mz.122-50.SE3.bin’. Verify that this updated by issuing ‘show boot’ then issue a ‘write’ ‘reload’ command.

If you encounter a problem during the reboot of the switch and end up in ROMMON mode the above linked document says to refer to the Troubleshooting section of the Release Notes of release you are using. This will help you get out of this little pickle...

I usually approach this type of procedure on the cautious side so I don’t end up blowing up my devices. If this is production equipment you should have all the steps you will or do follow documented, so the necessary change control can be accurately documented. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone.

let me introduce myself

2009-06-29T12:45:00.008-06:00

I chose IT as a career around thirteen years ago and have enjoyed it immensely thus far. IT is an interesting field to work in since you can work inside of many other industries but yet still be an IT specialist. There are many different areas of knowledge and expertise and things change fast which is awesome because it is never boring.
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how 2 upgrade cisco ios images on catalyst 3560 switches

let me introduce myself