Active/Standby upgrade - interface question

Disabling interfaces is recommended when using network failover because it keeps a unit from answering traffic while it thinks it's active. Since it takes a bit of time for the device to see its peer, it will assume it's active and immediately start responding to traffic. By keeping the management interface enabled, you're able to access the device to upgrade it and to validate it's 100% up before sending traffic to it.

 

 

In your case, you'd want to disable all interfaces except the mgmt interface on your standby device, upgrade it, wait until it was up, and then bring the other interfaces up. Unfortunately, because you're going from 9.4.7 to 10.1 where the network failover changes significantly, the two boxes will go active-active. So, you'll have to bring the other box down, bring the newly-upgraded one's interfaces up, and then clear ARP unless you're using MAC Masquerade.