I'm about to upgrade my first 1950 (tbh, my first HPE Comware switch period) and I'm probably over-analyzing (as is my style) it but the release notes are not very clear about what happens if the new images don't load and run properly. The release notes discuss upgrading from the CLI, but nothing about copying the current images to backup first as I would expect. Only how to issue the upgrade command, answer yes, and hope that everything goes right. Later on in the release notes there is a section titled "Handling software upgrade failures" which states "If a software upgrade fails, the system runs the old software version" but that sounds pretty generic to me.
Would anyone here suggest, from experience, that the existing images should be set as backup startup software images using the (Secret Squirrel mode, potentially unsupported) xtd-cli-mode -> boot-loader command first? I don't really see a downside to doing that, except that I don't know a way to unset those attributes later.
Even though it's not discussed in the release notes, there is also an upgrade section in the GUI which has a nice little step-by-step list of what to do. I'm sure it just gives you an (admittedly) more convenient way to load the .ipe file on to the switch via HTTP rather that using a TFTP server with the CLI upgrade command, and then it probably kicks off the exact same process after the file is transferred.
I'm just more comfortable with the good old method of loading the files to flash and specifying directly and explicitly which image I want to load at next boot and which one to try if that one fails... My fear is that one of these nice, convenient-looking, newfangled processes fails and then I have to drive 3.5 hours to the site before I can get a console cable plugged in to the switch and recover from all Hell breaking loose because I trusted the auto-magic to happen and it let me down. Any and all advice is welcomed.
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