Software releases and upgrades¶
SD-WAN receives constant improvements and bugfixes. This section describes our release processes and provides recommendations for successful upgrade projects.
Release procedure¶
We release new versions of SD-WAN four to six times per year using the following procedure.
Development and test¶
New software is subject to a suite of automated and manual tests that verify it works as planned. When all the features expected in a release are completed, it goes to the release candidate phase.
Release candidate¶
Software is released to a small number of partners. This is known as the release candidate (RC) period. Management servers, aggregators, and bonders are upgraded according to our recommendations in Effective upgrades. Any bugs found during the RC period are fixed before the general release. The RC period is usually about four weeks long.
General release¶
The new release is announced to all partners.
Management server upgrades¶
The SD-WAN vendor upgrades all management servers. In the release announcement, we propose a maintenance window for the upgrade. Partners can contact us to give a different maintenance window. Since customer traffic does not go through the management server, end-users are not affected by this upgrade. In most cases, management, monitoring, and aggregator failover are interrupted for 5-10 minutes during the upgrade.
Bonder, aggregator, & private WAN router upgrades¶
After the management server is upgraded, partners can perform node upgrades. Please review the Effective upgrades document and design an upgrade procedure based on those recommendations.
If bugs are found after the general release, they are usually fixed in a patch release.
Version compatibility¶
Management servers, bonders, aggregators, and private WAN routers are upgraded independently. This allows each host to be upgraded at an appropriate time for the site’s end-users, but requires managing compatibility between different software versions.
There is full compatibility between Debian releases and architectures. For example, a 64-bit Debian 7 (Wheezy) bonder works fine on a 32-bit Debian 6 (Squeeze) aggregator.
Please read Deprecation policy to find when support was dropped certain SD-WAN versions.
Management server & node compatibility¶
Management servers are compatible with nodes running software of the the same version or some earlier versions. For example, a 2015.1 management server is compatible with nodes running 2015.1, 2014.4, and some earlier versions. To manage this compatibility issue, node software upgrades are not made available to a partner until the partner’s management server is upgraded. Node upgrades are not released to all partners at once—the upgraded node software is issued to each partner one-by-one as their management servers are upgraded.
Bonder, aggregator, & private WAN router compatibility¶
Aggregators are compatible with bonders running software of the the same version or some earlier versions. For example, a 2015.1 aggregator is compatible with nodes running 2015.1, 2014.4, and some earlier versions. It is the partner’s responsibility to manage this compatibility issue by upgrading aggregators before bonders and by not assigning upgraded bonders to aggregators that have not yet been upgraded. For bonds with a secondary aggregator, the secondary aggregator must also run the same or later version as the bonder.
Similarly, private WAN routers are compatible with aggregators running software of the same version or some earlier version.