Manage firmware settings

The appliance has two partitions with separate firmware on each partition. Partitions are swapped during firmware updates, to roll back firmware updates.

Either partition can be active on the appliance. In the factory-installed state, partition 1 is active and contains the firmware version of the current released product. When we apply a firmware update, the update is installed on partition 2 and your policies and settings are copied from partition 1 to partition 2. The appliance restarts the system using partition 2, which is now the active partition. The appliance comes with identical firmware versions installed on both of the partitions so that we have a backup of the initial firmware configuration. Tip: Avoid swapping partitions to restore configuration and policy settings. Use snapshots to back up and restore configuration and policy settings.

Steps

1. Click System > Updates and Licensing > Firmware Settings.

2. On the Firmware Settings page, perform one or more of the following actions:

   Option	Description
   Edit	To edit the comment associated with a partition, select the partition and click Edit.
   Create Backup	Important: Create a backup of your firmware only when we are installing a fix pack provided by IBM Customer Support. Fix packs are installed on the active partition and we might not be able to uninstall the fix pack. The backup process can take several minutes to complete.
   Set Active	Set a partition active to use the firmware that is installed on that partition. For example, we might want to set a partition active to use firmware that does not contain a recently applied update or fix pack.

3. Click Yes. If we set a partition active, the appliance restarts the system using the newly activated partition.

Parent topic: Updates and licensing