Field Notice: FN – 72230 – Virtual Email Security Appliance/Security Management Appliance Upgrade Fails Due to Small Nextroot Partition Size – Workaround Provided

Problem Description
An attempt to upgrade a Virtual Email Security Apppliance (vESA) or Virtual Security Management Appliance (vSMA) with a nextroot partition size less than 500MB fails.

Background
Initially, vESA and vSMA images were built with a nextroot partition size of less than 500MB. Over the years, and with later AsyncOS releases that include additional features, upgrades have had to use more and more of this partition throughout the upgrade process. This results in upgrades that fail because of this partition size.

This issue is known to affect upgrades to AsyncOS Version 14.x, 15.x, and later for both ESA and SMA appliances.

This advisory can be found at the following link:
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field-notices/722/fn72230.html