1. Home
  2. Cisco Systems
  3. Cisco Software Advisor - used for baselining software versions?

Cisco Software Advisor - used for baselining software versions?

Hi folks,

I am about to go through a major upgrade program in my company as per other posts. I've been crawling the cisco website to find tools that may help me doing this. I've cam accross a tool called the "Software Advisor", it's pretty cool but I have some questions about it that I hope some of you may help me with.

I use the "find software compatible with my hardware", I then select "Enter your hardware configuration using show command output from your device", I copy and paste my "sh ver" and "sh diag", it then tells me a version of software for my device. Now is this the "recommended" software I should use as it's "Compatible" with my hardware, as long as it doesn't contain any bugs (that I care about) or lacks features that I need? So can I use this for setting baseline software versions for my hardware?

Why does a 3640 only get recommended a 12.3(17c) version of software and not 12.4?

After I ran the advisor on one of my devices it gave me a couple of differnet versions of software, I then get the message "This image requires more memory than currently (as per show version) installed on your device. If you select this image, please upgrade your memory before upgrading to it" The "show version" shows "31360K bytes of ATA System CompactFlash (Read/Write)" which is equivilant of 30.625MB. The minimum flash is 32MB, for the selected image, do I not have 32MB?

thanks folks Dave

Reply to
dhodgson7
Loading thread data ...

Yep, it and Feature Navigator are where you want to be.

12.4 is only recomended in limited deployment. 12.3(x) mainline is for general deployment.

Cisco is pretty conservative for their software recomendations.

Yes, newer and newer images require huge amounts of more memory.

Its not necessarily Flash that is limited, but also DRAM in the box.

12.4 probably requires maxing out your 3640 in DRAM for most feature sets. Looks like IP only gets away with *only* 64M of DRAM installed.. :) Some early 3640's probably shipped with 16M of DRAM and 4M of Flash....
Reply to
Doug McIntyre

Be careful with these recommendations.

Cisco will try to always recommend the latest release which of course requires the most memory, etc, etc

You may have no need for any of the features in the recommended release.

BTW all of these new features have TONS of bugs which may also impact base functionality.

In the "old" days one could usual pick a GD realease (General Deployment) and be done with it; those days are long gone...

I have witnessed many a network engineer impaling themselves by going with the latest and greatest IOS release.

Just consider how painful it will be to back out a faulty release once you have implemented it one 50 or 100 routers

Reply to
Merv

Thanks Doug,

but what about this warning about the flash? Do you think I have 32MB flash and it's just not reporting correct in the "sh ver"?

Dave

Reply to
dhodgson7

The Cisco Software Advisor is the most worthless tool Cisco has ever come out with. To me, it should tell you what version of code and what feature set you need when you feed your hardware and specific features you need. Instead, you have to tell it what specific features you want, and what feature set you have. Seems very backwards and stupid to me. If I knew the feature set I needed, then I wouldn't be using it in the first place. This tool has been around for years, and I don't think they are ever going to fix this glaring (to me anyway) omission in how the tool works.

Reply to
Thrill5

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.