After upgrade to 12.1 55.13/18 customer may observe pool license going missing from the ADC for 10 minutes which leads to missing configuration on the ADC as all the features will be disabled, After 10 minutes of the upgrade process reboot ADC does a warm reboot and restores all the configuration and pool license.

Due to licensing optimizations,ADC 12.1 54.x and lower builds are not compatible with 12.1 55.13/18, 12.1 56.X and 13.0 GA builds. In case customer is using private build, 12.1.55.4 and lower builds are not compatible with 12.1.55.4+ and 13.0 Q1 2020 builds.


For any upgrade and downgrade between these builds will ignore the last pooled config while boot-up and will be unlicensed on upgrade/downgrade. Any subsequent reboot will restore the license of the ADC as per config. 

Below are the steps to follow while upgrading/downgrading across incompatible builds.

1. Check the current configured capacity of ADC using the command “show ns capacity" and check the license using the command "show ns license"
2. Upgrade/downgrade the ADC
3. Check "show ns capacity" and "show ns license"
   • If after step 3, it does not show correct bandwidth (i.e same as prior to upgrade), then do step 4 and step 5, else if bandwidth shown is correct then skip to step 6. Or review the Other solution section.
4. Perform below steps to ensure that license allocation is done.  
   • Reconfigure the same capacity by executing CLI command “unset ns capacity -bandwidth” and then “set ns capacity –bandwidth xxxx –unit <gbps/mbps> –edition yyyy”.  
   • Ensure set ns capacity command is successful. If so, go to step 5, if not repeat step .
5. warm reboot
6. Licensed correctly, so proceed with upgrade/downgrade of other nodes.

In unlicensed state, Please do not issue a “save ns config” or failover.

Other Solution: You may perform a warm reboot of ADC without saving the configuration on the upgraded node and it should restore the license and configuration

Please note that this behavior is only seen, if upgrade or downgrade is performed to 12.1 55.13/18 and any subsequent upgrades would not be impacted with this issue.

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Problem Cause

This issue was caused due to licensing optimizations performed in 12.1 55.13/18 and 13.0 Q1 2020 build to address the long boot time taken by ADC when License server is over the WAN.