Cisco IOS-XE Release Schedule

Cisco IOS-XE releases generally follow the schedule as follows:

■Standard Maintenance (SM) Release - Defect fixes for 6 months.

■Extended Maintenance (EM) Release - Defect fixes for 24 months.

There are typically 3 major releases each year:

■End of March - Standard Maintenance

■End of July - Extended Maintenance

■End of November - Standard Maintenance

Cisco IOS-XE Release 17.2.1

Cisco IOS-XE Release 17.2.1 includes the following Cisco image:

■c6300-universalk9.17.02.01.SPA.bin

The latest software downloads for the ESR6300 can be found at:

https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286323493/type

Click on the ESR6300 link to take you to the specific software you are looking for.

The following features are not supported on the ESR6300 with software release 17.2.1:

■No support for MacSec or DLEP in this release. (MQC: modular quality of service command line).

■Layer 2 COS to DSCP mapping does not work due to no ASIC chipset support for the feature.

■Copper FE SFPs are not supported on the ESR6300.

■Copper GE SFPs are only supported in config terminal > service internal > service unsupported-transceiver mode.

■Cisco does not claim IP Mobility for Ethernet support on the ESR6300.

■Auto-negotiation for 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1000Mbps in full-duplex mode is supported. For half duplex, support is only on 10Mbps and 100Mbps.

■IOx Application access to serial port or USB-serial  is not supported.

■Refer to the Cisco Approved Vendor List (AVL]) for Cisco USBs. Kingston USB 3.0 works as well. Ensure the USB has a single partition and ext2, Fat16, or Fat32 format only.

■Cellular functionality is not supported.

■Radio Aware Routing is not supported.

■There is no WebUI support for Day 0 or Day 1 configuration

■For Security: No support for TLS, TrustSec, MacSec, CWS [Cloud Web Security], IDS/IPS.

This release has the following limitations or deviations for expected behavior:

■The WebUI Licensing Page is unsupported for release 17.2.1. For all licensing configuration, please use CLI mode or CSSM.

■In the Web User Interface (WebUI), there are two known issues where erroneous information is displayed. In both of these cases, the information is present in the WebUI even though the functionality is NOT supported on the ESR6300.

–Under Configuration > Security > Threat Defense > snort there is a RAM and DISK size prerequisite check that fails.

–Under Configuration > Security > there is a category for Trustsec.

These are both cosmetic issues due to the features being unavailable in the 17.2.1 release.

■The IOS boot system setting allows users to specify any flash-based storage URL for IOS image booting.

The rommon on the ESR6300 does not expose the non-IOX msata partition, therefore auto-booting from mSATA will not work even if it is configured in IOS.

Example : Users must not configure a boot system setting as follows:

■Receive a message 'unable to open bootflash:golden.bin (14)' during bootup.

Example: Pushing the reset button displays the unable to open message.

This message is intended by design to inform the user they have not setup a golden.bin config file.

MTU Support

From this release on, an interface MTU can be configured for 64 - 9216.

Serial Port Support

Additional protocol capabilities have been added to the ESR6300 to bring it into feature compatibility with the IR1101. These include:

■SCADA Gateway functionality (IEC10x and DNP3)

■Raw Socket (TCP and UDP)

■Line Relay

■Reverse Telnet

All of the configuration and show commands will be the same as are available on the IR1101 platform.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/access/1101/software/configuration/guide/b_IR1101config.html

Booting from IOS

The following configuration steps need to be taken in order to boot from the USB.

To display the boot options:

The syntax for the boot command is:

boot config usbflash0: <file name>

For example:

The environment variable CONFIG_FILE in the following example confirms that the startup-config is set to boot from usbflash0.

Booting from ROMMON

The following configuration steps need to be taken in order to boot from the USB.

From the ROMMON prompt, execute set CONFIG_FILE=usbflash0: <filename>

For example:

Continue booting the IOS image as usual from the ROMMON prompt.

Booting from the USB Feature Summary

■Once the CONFIG_FILE is set to a non-default value, the nvram:startup-config command is aliased to this new location.

■Any change made to the config file in usbflash will be reflected in nvram:startup-config as well.

■The EXEC command erase nvram:startup-config erases the contents of NVRAM, and deletes the file referenced by CONFIG_FILE variable.

■If the USB is unplugged after setting the boot config usbflash0: <filename> variable, then the day 0 default configuration will take effect.

■When the configuration is saved using the copy system:running-config nvram:startup-config command, the device saves a complete version of the configuration file to the location specified by the CONFIG_FILE environment variable, and a distilled version to NVRAM. A distilled version is one that does not contain access list information.

Open Caveats

■ CSCvu75971

Benign bootup warning messages appear on the console.

Symptom : The following messages are seen during bootup:

Workaround : Ignore these messages. They are not indicating any problem, and will be removed in a future release.

■ CSCvt35500

Warning and Critical thresholds are incorrect, and no syslog is generated.

Symptoms : There are two issues to this defect:

1. The platform resources thresholds are wrong, for example:

The limits for Warning thresholds must be [80%, 88%, 70%] instead of [80%, 80%, 70%].

The limits for Critical thresholds must be [90%, 93%, 90%] instead of [85%, 85%, 90%].

2. When the threshold limits (at the currently incorrect threshold values) have been reached or exceeded, the ESR 6300 never generates PLATFORM_ELEMENT syslogs to indicate that the WARNING or CRITICAL thresholds have been reached.

Workaround : There is no workaround.

Resolved Caveats

None at this time.

Any Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and phone numbers used in this document are not intended to be actual addresses and phone numbers. Any examples, command display output, network topology diagrams, and other figures included in the document are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any use of actual IP addresses or phone numbers in illustrative content is unintentional and coincidental.

Model Driven Telemetry - gRPC Dial-Out: Expands existing Model Driven Telemetry capabilities with the addition of gRPC protocol support and Dial-Out (configured) telemetry subscriptions.

YANG Data Models: For the list of Cisco IOS XE YANG models available with this release, navigate to:

https://github.com/YangModels/yang/tree/master/vendor/cisco/xe

Revision statements embedded in the YANG files indicate if there has been a model revision. The README.md file in the same GitHub location highlights changes that have been made in the release.

© 2019-2020 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.