We have a few servers running versions 1.3.2 and 1.3.7. We want to upgrade these to the latest 1.4.x.
Searching the forums is looks like there were a few upgrade issues early in the 1.4.0 cycle.
My question is what is the best/recommended upgrade path? Should we upgrade to 1.3.8 before upgrading to 1.4.2?
Also, can we upgrade using an image that appears to be labeled “Fresh Installation”?
Thanks!
Where do you see that a particular image is only for fresh installs? That additional context might help to explain it, especially to those of us who aren’t enterprise customers and therefore haven’t seen the download site for the LTS builds. 
When downloading a LTS .iso. The file is labeled as “Fresh Installation”.
I’d recommend to write to support to clarify.
What’s the email address? [email protected]?
Note, my company does not have a subscription, but we have been providing support via Open Collective for years.
So I sent an email to [email protected], received an initial response that asked for a clarification and then nothing.
Really just want to know if it is safe to upgrade directly from 1.3.2 and 1.3.7 to 1.4.2. Of it not what is the recommended sequence.
The safest and most recommended upgrade path is to proceed version by version without skipping any releases. That means:
1.3.2 → 1.3.3 → … → 1.3.7 → 1.3.8
Once you’re on 1.3.8, you can then proceed with the upgrade to 1.4.0. However, due to some known issues early in the 1.4.0 cycle, I highly recommend first testing the upgrade in a separate staging environment. This allows you to verify compatibility, check for migration issues, and compare configurations between versions to ensure nothing breaks in the process.
After reaching 1.4.0 and confirming stability, continue upgrading step-by-step:
1.4.0 → 1.4.1 → 1.4.2 → …
I doubt that applies to VyOS.
VyOS uses a squashfs filesystem as base for each version along with an overlayfs to make any changes persistent for that particular version/installation.
So when you upgrade VyOS except for the configfile itself nothing is remained from the old installation (well content of /config is copied to the new overlayfs).
You can just reboot back to the old installation due to the above design of VyOS.
So what happens when you perform an upgrade is that the new squashfs is copied to a directory in the storage and an overlayfs directory is created. Then the content from /config is copied to this new overlayfs directory.
Finally the box is rebooted.
Upon boot the migrationscripts are runned comparing the “magicstring” at bottom of the config file to know if they should be runned and in that case which scripts should be running. They are versioned per config section.
So if you got one box with 1.3.2 and another with 1.3.7 I would go for the latest stable (or nightly depending on if you want 1.4 LTS or 1.5 current) and go straight from whatever version you currently have installed.
The same migration script which is being runned when you do 1.3.2 → 1.3.3 → … → 1.3.7 → 1.38 will be runned when you go 1.3.2 → 1.3.8.
Actually newer VyOS might have fixed issues in older migrationscripts so going 1.3.2 → final version is safer than going 1.3.2 → all versions in between → final version (that you end up at today).
And if ■■■■ hit the fan just reboot the box and you are back to your 1.3.2 (select that in the boot menu) as it were before you started the upgrade.
Thank you! Very helpful.
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