Firmware Upgrades; Firmware Upgrade Basics - Fortinet FortiGate 6000F Series System Manual

Firmware upgrades

In addition to introducing the basics of upgrading FortiGate 6000F firmware, this section describes how to:
Upgrade the firmware running on individual FPCs.
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Upgrade the management board firmware from the BIOS and reset the configuration of all of the FPCs.
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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.
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Verify the recommended upgrade path, as documented in the release notes.
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Back up your FortiGate 6000F configuration.
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FortiGate 6000F Series 7.0.12 System Guide
Fortinet Technologies Inc.
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.
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