About Rollbacks
A rollback allows you to take a snapshot, or user checkpoint, of the Cisco NX-OS configuration and then reapply that configuration to your device at any point without having to reload the device. A rollback allows any authorized administrator to apply this checkpoint configuration without requiring expert knowledge of the features configured in the checkpoint.
Cisco NX-OS automatically creates system checkpoints. You can use either a user or system checkpoint to perform a rollback.
You can create a checkpoint copy of the current running configuration at any time. Cisco NX-OS saves this checkpoint as an ASCII file which you can use to roll back the running configuration to the checkpoint configuration at a future time. You can create multiple checkpoints to save different versions of your running configuration.
When you roll back the running configuration, you can trigger the following rollback types:
- atomic—Implement a rollback only if no errors occur.
- best-effort—Implement a rollback and skip any errors.
- stop-at-first-failure—Implement a rollback that stops if an error occurs.
The default rollback type is atomic.
When you are ready to roll back to a checkpoint configuration, you can view the changes that will be applied to your current running configuration before committing to the rollback operation. If an error occurs during the rollback operation, you can choose to cancel the operation, or ignore the error and proceed with the rollback. If you cancel the operation, Cisco NX-OS provides a list of changes already applied before the error occurred. You need to clean up these changes manually.
Automatically Generated System Checkpoints
The Cisco NX-OS software automatically generates system checkpoints to help you avoid a loss of configuration information. System checkpoints are generated by the following events:
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Disabling an enabled feature with the no feature command
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Removing an instance of a Layer 3 protocol, such as with the no router bgp command or the no ip pim sparse-mode command
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License expiration of a feature
If one of these events causes system configuration changes, the feature software creates a system checkpoint that you can use to roll back to the previous system configuration. The system generated checkpoint filenames begin with “system-” and include the feature name. For example, the first time that you disable the EIGRP feature, the system creates the checkpoint named system-fm-__inst_1__eigrp.
High Availability
Whenever a checkpoint is created using the checkpoint or checkpoint checkpoint_name commands, the checkpoint is synchronized to the standby unit.
A rollback remembers the states of the checkpoint operation, so if the checkpoint operation is interrupted and the system is left in an inconsistent state, a rollback can complete the checkpoint operation (synchronize the checkpoint with the standby unit) before proceeding with the rollback operation.
Your checkpoint files are still available after a process restart or supervisor switchover. Even if there is an interruption during the process restart or supervisor switchover, the checkpoint will complete successfully before proceeding with the operation. In a supervisor switchover, the checkpoint is completed on the new active unit.
If a process restart or supervisor switchover occurs during a rollback operation, after the restart or switchover completes, the rollback will resume from its previous state and complete successfully.
Virtualization Support
Cisco NX-OS creates a checkpoint of the running configuration. You can create different checkpoint copies.