How do I upgrade a Virtual or Hardware Appliance to a later version of Zeus Traffic Manager?

These instructions describe how to upgrade a Zeus Traffic Manager or Zeus Load Balancer appliance (virtual or hardware). For instructions on upgrading Zeus software, please see here.

Upgrading from one revision to another

Upgrading revisions in the same product version (e.g. 4.2r1 to 4.2r2) are performed using the Administration Server. Download the upgrade package from your customer page, go to the System -> Upgrade page, upload the upgrade package, and follow the instructions.

You will need to complete this process for each Appliance in your cluster.

Expected downtime for an upgrade will be a couple of seconds while the Traffic Management software is restarted. Sometimes it will be necessary to reboot the Appliance to complete the upgrade. The user interface will inform you if this is necessary when the upgrade is complete. You should ensure that the Appliance is rebooted at the most appropriate time.

Full Upgrades

Upgrades between minor and major versions (e.g. 4.1 to 4.2 or 5.1 to 6.0) are performed using a commandline script to install the new version into a spare section of the hard disk. This process involves one reboot and the downtime associated with that reboot.

Intermediate Steps

When skipping versions, you must upgrade to the 'r0' release first and then apply the upgrade to the latest revision as described above. For example if you want to upgrade from 5.0r1 to 6.0r1, you need to take two steps:

5.0r1 -> 6.0 -> 6.0r1

Important Note for upgrades to version 5.1r2 or earlier

When upgrading a virtual or hardware appliance to version 5.1r2 or earlier, you should not skip version numbers; you must apply the 'r0' upgrade packages for each intervening major and minor version. For example, to upgrade from version 4.2 to version 5.1r2, you should upgrade as follows: 4.2 -> 5.0r0 -> 5.1r0 -> 5.1r2.

Note, these instructions are not suitable for upgrading from ZXTM 4.0, you need to follow these instructions instead.

Note: If you have Traffic IP Groups using the 'keeptogether' flag that contain 'passive' machines, you should mark all machines as active before upgrading from ZXTM 4.1 to ZXTM 4.2 or later. Once the upgrade is complete, set these machines to 'passive' again.

Releases prior to 4.2 don't correctly handle the combination of keeptogether flag and passive machines, so leaving your configuration unchanged while upgrading may cause Traffic IP addresses to appear on multiple ZXTM machines.

1. Before upgrading it is prudent to have a backup of your configuration.
2. Download the ZXTM Install package from customer.zeus.com. This will be a file called something like ZeusTM_60_Appliance-x86_64.zpkg.
3. Copy the file onto the appliance using an scp or sftp client (e.g. psftp).
4. Connect to the console of the appliance using a 'ssh' client (putty is a good choice). You can use any username that is in the admin group.
5. Once connected to the console of the appliance run: upgrade-appliance <filename>:
   
6. Confirm that you want to upgrade the appliance.
7. Once complete the new version will be automatically selected after the next reboot. Any configuration changes made in the existing version (e.g. in 4.1) after the upgrade-appliance script has been run won't be preserved when the new version is started.
8. It is recommended that you reboot the appliance as soon as possible (using the System -> Reboot button in the UI or using the 'reboot' command).

More Information

For more detailed information, please refer to the appropriate 'Getting Started' guide in the product documentation.