CAUTION Service Disruption

An NSP system upgrade requires a thorough understanding of NSP system administration and platform requirements, and is supported only under the conditions described in this guide, the NSP Planning Guide, and the NSP Release Notice.

Such an operation must be planned, documented, and tested in advance on a trial system that is representative of the target live network. Contact NSP professional services to assess the requirements of your NSP deployment, and for information about the upgrade service, which you are strongly recommended to engage for any type of deployment.

The following pathways provide comprehensive overviews of the required upgrade activities for advance planning purposes:

• Pathway for standalone NSP system upgrade from Release 25.11 or later

• Pathway for DR NSP system upgrade from Release 25.11 or later

Each pathway includes links to the required procedures for completing the upgrade.

Note: An NSP system that manages a large number of NEs may require several hours, or potentially a full day for a very large network, to resynchronize the network following an NSP upgrade. It is important to consider the resynchronization time when planning a maintenance window for NSP upgrade activity.

Note: Before you attempt an NSP upgrade, ensure that any third-party software installed on the NSP deployer host or any NSP cluster VM is disabled and stopped.

Note: A system that was previously installed by the root user can be upgraded and installed by the NSP admin user only if Kubernetes is uninstalled during the upgrade.

If you install NSP as a non-root user, the designated NSP admin user must be the owner of the /opt/nsp directory. See  Restricting root-user system access for more information.

Note: If you are upgrading to Release 26.4 or later and your deployment includes Application Assurance (AA) Analytics Reporting or IPDR use cases, contact Nokia support for more information.

Note: Check Alerts before you attempt an NSP upgrade.

Licensing

Your NSP system may require a new or updated license in Centralized License Manager, depending on your deployment and the NSP release from which you upgrade. It is recommended that you contact Nokia early in the planning process with the CLM UUID to obtain the required license for your upgraded deployment.

To install your NSP license, see “How do I install the NSP license?” in the NSP System Administrator Guide.

Kubernetes version

The NSP requires specific Kubernetes registry and deployment software versions. The NSP cluster upgrade procedure includes steps for performing the required Kubernetes environment upgrade.

Note: Attempting to upgrade an NSP system without upgrading Kubernetes as prescribed results in failure.

You can also perform an off-cycle Kubernetes upgrade independent of an NSP software upgrade; see Kubernetes deployment environment for information.

DR NSP system upgrade

After the preliminary upgrade preparation of each NSP cluster, the standby cluster is stopped while the primary is upgraded. Network visibility is lost during the primary cluster upgrade, as indicated in Pathway for DR NSP system upgrade from Release 25.11 or later, which lists the upgrade operations that are to be performed on each NSP cluster.

Some stages of the DR upgrade process can be performed on each cluster concurrently, for example, data and configuration backups, software downloads, and file transfers.

Upgrading to a service pack release

A service pack always includes an NSP deployer, which only contains the updates to the base (GA) image. You always need the service pack bundle and the base bundle for installation.

The service pack bundle may include an updated version of the Kubernetes deployer, which the installation procedure uses. If not, use the Kubernetes deployer from the base bundle in the NSP cluster installation procedure.

There are two paths to the NSP deployer. The version for the service pack bundle is higher than the base bundle. All installation operations are performed using the NSP deployer in the service pack bundle except when you import software image in the procedure, which are imported from both locations.