How often do you upgrade your IOS?

[cpals]

Just wondering if your company has a scheduled maintenance time once a month, once a year, etc set aside to update your IOS for your Cisco equipment?

Or do you just update it when something breaks and you need to fix it? That's how we've been at my place, but I think that is mainly because nobody where I work is very involved in the networking side of things and don't know any better. I'm trying to start being more proactive.

 

[spidey07]

This is what I recommend.

1) Quarterly review of your standards for IOS on every platform, that means reading the release notes/bugs of said platforms/versions. You can get by with a yearly review as long as you follow the next point. It really depends on the platform and train you are running.
2) Any security alert is good enough reason to upgrade ASAP and schedule accordingly, yet another reason for full redundancy. You can upgrade at will with minimal if not non-existent downtime.
3) Test in lab before rolling out

To wrap it up - I recommend upgrading when you have a reason to do so and standardize on those versions. There's also the school of thought to keep your different layers at different levels to minimize bugs...I'm not so keen on that.

Did I mention you need to read the release notes in full? Every line?

 

[cpals]

Thanks for the help as usual.

 

[cmetz]

Whenever there's a critical security flaw or show-stopping bug in a version we're running that affects a feature we are using.

Which is WAY too often. Every few months.

ALWAYS lab test IOS updates before deployment and roll out over a period. If you expect Cisco to do good QA anymore, or if you update all your boxen the same night, you're setting yourself up for a major problem.