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This chapter discusses general considerations that customers need to make when upgrading the Cisco ASAP Solution or the PSTN gateway solutions. Generally speaking, redundancy must be provided to support upgrades without affecting service availability.
Although it is up to the service provider to determine the service availability required by its customers, it remains good practice to ensure that voice traffic is not interrupted. In many cases, "five nines" (99.999%) availability may be required. In addition to providing redundancy to cover outages of equipment or communications channels, it is necessary to provide redundancy to support traffic during upgrades of the Cisco IOS and signaling controller software.
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Caution It is the responsibility of the service provider to engineer the network in such a way as to provide the required service availability for their customers. |
This chapter presents the following major topics:
This chapter addresses the following components of the Cisco ASAP Solution and the PSTN gateway solutions: Cisco AS5000 series gateways, Cisco 3660 and Cisco 7200 series gatekeepers, Cisco MGC node components, and third-party accounting and billing platforms.
To ensure that software upgrades on a gateway (GW), gatekeepers (GK), and directory gatekeepers (DGK) in an H.323 network do not affect service availability, Cisco recommends that you provide redundancy for all components of the gatekeeper core. Note the following considerations:
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Note The most recent information about upgrading the Cisco IOS software can be found in the Release Notes for your software. |
To upgrade software at the GW level, follow the steps below.
1. Ensure that the new Cisco IOS image is available on the TFTP server.
2. Download the new Cisco IOS files from a TFTP server to available flash memory on the selected routers beforehand. To minimize service unavailability, it is recommended that you upgrade only one router at a time.
3. Select a maintenance window that ensures the least disruption of traffic. Do the following during the maintenance window.
a. Redirect traffic from the routers whose software is to be upgraded.
b. If you have GWs that support SS7 links, you must take those links out of service (OOS) on the Cisco SC2200 that supports those links.
c. Reboot the routers to move the new image from flash memory to RAM. This activates the IOS upgrade.
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Note Rebooting can take up to 5 minutes. |
It is essential that billing information not be lost. In addition to providing redundancy to cover outages of equipment or communications channels, it is necessary to provide redundancy to maintain billing data during upgrades of software to support billing applications. Components to consider include AAA/RADIUS servers, OSP (Open Systems Protocol) servers, and other servers providing third-party billing and settlement applications.
It is generally not necessary to provide redundancy at the network management level, because these applications can go out of service during a maintenance window with minimal impact on traffic. However, it is the responsibility of the service provider to consider any possible effects such outages may have, and provide redundancy if necessary.
For information about upgrading the Cisco ASAP Solution, refer to the following documents:
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/access/solution/asap/index.htm
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/access/sc/rel7/soln/das/upgrade/index.htm
For information about upgrading the Cisco SS7 Interconnect for Voice Gateways Solution, refer to the Cisco SS7 Interconnect for Access Servers and Voice Gateways Upgrade, Release 2.x at the following URL:
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/access/sc/rel9/soln/voip20/upgrade/index.htm
For information about upgrading the Cisco PSTN Gateway Solution, refer to the following documents:
http://cco/univercd/cc/td/doc/solution/dialvoic/pstngw/relnote/index.htm
Posted: Wed Jan 22 01:46:42 PST 2003
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