Firmware upgrade basics

The management board and the FPCs in your FortiGate 6000F system run the same firmware image. You upgrade the firmware from the management board GUI or CLI just as you would any FortiGate product.

You can perform a graceful firmware upgrade of an FGCP cluster by setting upgrade-mode to uninterruptible and enabling session-pickup. A graceful firmware upgrade only causes minimal traffic interruption.

Upgrading the firmware of a standalone FortiGate 6000F, or FortiGate 6000F HA cluster with upgrade-mode set to simultaneous interrupts traffic because the firmware running on the management board and all of the FPCs upgrades in one step. These firmware upgrades should be done during a quiet time because traffic will be interrupted during the upgrade process.

A firmware upgrade takes a few minutes, depending on the number of FPCs in your FortiGate 6000F system. Some firmware upgrades may take longer depending on factors such as the size of the configuration and whether an upgrade of the DP3 processor is included.

Before beginning a firmware upgrade, Fortinet recommends that you perform the following tasks:

• Review the latest release notes for the firmware version that you are upgrading to.
• Verify the recommended upgrade path, as documented in the release notes.
• Back up your FortiGate 6000F configuration.

To make sure a FortiGate 6000F firmware upgrade is successful, before starting the upgrade Fortinet recommends you use health checking to make sure the management board and the FPCs are all synchronized and operating as expected. If you are following a multi-step upgrade path, you should re-do health checking after each upgrade step to make sure all components are synchronized before the next step. You should also perform a final round of health checking after the firmware upgrade process is complete. For recommended health checking commands, see the following Fortinet community article: Technical Tip: FortiGate-6000/7000 Chassis health check commands.

Fortinet recommends that you review the services provided by your FortiGate 6000F before a firmware upgrade and then again after the upgrade to make sure that these services continue to operate normally. For example, you might want to verify that you can successfully access an important server used by your organization before the upgrade and make sure that you can still reach the server after the upgrade and performance is comparable. You can also take a snapshot of key performance indicators (for example, number of sessions, CPU usage, and memory usage) before the upgrade and verify that you see comparable performance after the upgrade.