CUCM 8.6 Device Pack Upgrade

[Peter Arment]

We are getting ready to upgrade the device pack in our CUCM 8.6.2.20000-2 cluster to support new phones and endpoints. We have 1 Publisher and 2 Subscribers in our cluster. Can anyone give me a run down of the pitfalls/hazards they faced doing this kind of upgrade? The hope is that we might avoid them if we know about them in advance.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Terry Cheema]

You can download the latest version of device pack from here: https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=283782839&softwareid=282074299&release=8.6%282.24123%29

Here is the read me containing all the installation instructions:

https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=283782839&softwareid=282074299&release=8.6%282.24123%29

Its basically a simple procedure, you install this on your publisher and then on your subscribers.

Then reboot your Pub server followed by sub servers.

Below are some point people tend to overlook:

1) A cluster reboot is a must. Phones will not register to any server, that was not rebooted, even though it has device pack installed. So you need to reboot all servers after applying the DP to make sure it takes affect.

2) When you apply a device pack to add support for new phones, the device pack will not only add support for new phones, but will also upgrade firmware of all phones. So you need to plan accordingly, there are methods to avoid that using import/export function if you want to keep firmware version on your existing phones same.

Other than that you are good to go.

-Terry

Please rate all helpful posts and mark the thread as answered if you have no other queries

[Peter Arment]

Thanks for the info...

We don't have a large system (less than 700 phones of various types). We are doing the update over a weekend during a maintenance window so network traffic will be at a minimum. I would like all the phones to come up to the latest load so hopefully the network impact will be relatively short.

Thanks again...

[Terry Cheema · Accepted solution]

As I said before install the device pack and reboot the servers one by one, there is nothing much you need to worry about. You should be good.

Its not a huge number of phones and I wouldn't worry too much but if you still want you can enable peer firmware sharing for the phones separated by WAN, with it only one phone at a site downloads the firmware and forms a tree, sharing the firmware with other phones, reducing the load on the wan link.

Ref:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cuipph/9971_9951_8961/8_6/english/admin_guide/9971ena86/9971usr.html#wp1031466

-Terry

Please rate all helpful posts and mark the thread as answered if you have no other queries.
 

[Peter Arment]

All,

Thanks for the replies...

Our device pack update went well and your information was very useful.

[Terry Cheema]

Peter - thanks for the update, glad to hear your update went well. Please do mark the thread as answered if you have no other queries and do rate the helpful posts.

See you around.

-Terry

[Brandon Pierce]

As Terry said, the process is easy and straight forward.  The only thing you need to keep in mind is, when you push a device pack, it is going to update all of your firmware for all devices.  Sometimes this is not desired due to network constraints, so just keep that in mind.

[Peter Arment]

Thanks for the info...

[panjwani80]

I need to install device pack on CUCM 10.5 cluster to support 8831 firmware 10.3.1. However, I don't want to upgrade other half dozen phone models running in customer environment. Please let me know if following steps would work or are there any other options available

1) Deactivate the TFTP service on all servers

2) Take a screenshot of device default page

3) Install device pack, reboot the cluster.

3) Change the device default to the firmware version prior to device pack install except for 8831

4) Activate TFTP service.

[Aman Soi]

it would work.

Also, instead of de-activating /activating tftp service, u can change the device default of phones other than 8831 prior to rebooting the server.

regds,

aman

[panjwani80]

great thanks!