HA cluster firmware upgrades

Both management boards and all of the FPCs in a FortiGate-6000 HA cluster run the same firmware image. You upgrade the firmware from the primary FortiGate-6000 management board.

You can perform a graceful firmware upgrade of an FGCP cluster by enabling uninterruptible-upgrade and session-pickup. A graceful firmware upgrade only causes minimal traffic interruption. Use the following command to enable these settings; they are disabled by default. These settings are synchronized.

config system ha

set uninterruptible-upgrade enable

set session-pickup enable

end

When these settings are enabled, the primary FortiGate-6000 management board uploads firmware to the secondary FortiGate-6000 management board. The secondary management board uploads the firmware to all of the FPCs in the secondary FortiGate-6000. Then the management board and all of the FPCs in the secondary FortiGate-6000 upgrade their firmware, reboot, and resynchronize.

Then all traffic fails over to the secondary FortiGate-6000 which becomes the new primary FortiGate-6000. Then the management board and the FPCs in the new secondary FortiGate-6000 upgrade their firmware and rejoin the cluster. Unless override is enabled, the new primary FortiGate-6000 continues to operate as the primary FortiGate-6000.

Normally you would want to enable uninterruptible-upgrade to minimize traffic interruptions. But uninterruptible-upgrade does not have to be enabled. In fact, if a traffic interruption is not going to cause any problems, you can disable uninterruptible-upgrade so that the firmware upgrade process takes less time.

As well some firmware upgrades may not support uninterruptible-upgrade. For example, uninterruptible-upgrade may not be supported if the firmware upgrade also includes a DP3 processor firmware upgrade. Make sure to review the release notes before running a firmware upgrade to verify whether or not enabling uninterruptible-upgrade is supported to upgrade to that version.