Upgrade 5.0 to 6.1

[Anon1]

Firewall device has two disk partitions:

Partition 1 => 5.0.X

Partition 2 => 5.0.Y (current active version)

When you install now 6.0.X, it will overwrite 5.0.X

So after reboot Partition 1 will be active. Then you install the next update to 6.1.X, this will overwrite Partition 2.

Partition 1 => 6.0.X

Partition 2 => 6.1.X (active version after upgrade finished)

But now the stable 5.0.Y version which was running without issues is no longer available for rollback in case of issues with the new version.

Is there a possibility to select the Partition which is used for installation of upgrades? I would rather like to overwrite the interim 6.0.X version with the final 6.1.X version than the 5.0.Y version which was running before the upgrade. The only rollback method would be to do a time consuming factory reset and install 5.0.Y?

Does anybody have experience with upgrades jumping over several major versions?

[pulukas]

You cannot control the partition usage.  But the rollback process is pretty simple in the gui.

When I do major release upgrades, I generally create a snapshot and download this prior to the install.  This is a fallback in case the upgrade goes badly or needs to be rolled back.  The upgrade process itself does create and use these configuration snapshots automatically.  But I like to have a manual one as well.

In running upgrades across major release, I generally rollback about one in five times because we hit some kind of anomalous behavior.  But the most recent moves from 5 to 6 have all gone well on the firewalls.  I did hit a bug in Panorama upgrades from 5 to 6 but that was an edge case pretty specific to the configuration.