There are two primary types of upgrade -- upgrade for Bare Metal Systems, and upgrade for Virtualized Systems.

Upgrading Vyatta Core on Bare Metal Systems

1. Image Upgrade

Image upgrade is available for Release 6.0 and later and is the recommended method for upgrading your Vyatta system. Image upgrade involves downloading the latest Vyatta system image from the Vyatta web site and adding it to the list of available Vyatta versions installed on your bare metal system.

For example, to install <vyatta.software>.iso located at http://www.vyatta.org/downloads/ you would do the following:

add system image http://www.vyatta.org/downloads/<vyatta.software>.iso

Make sure that your system has connectivity to the Internet and access to a DNS server (see the documentation for complete configuration information) before you issue the above command. 

2. Package Upgrade - DEPRECATED

The package upgrade method of upgrading and the full-upgrade command are no longer supported. Note that, while the full-upgrade command is still visible in the command line, it is not supported. Instead, use image upgrade to upgrade your Vyatta system.

3. Using the LiveCD

This will be a "clean install" with everything but the configuration wiped clean.

After burning the CD which you can download from the Vyatta web site, boot it on your system. Log in to the system as vyatta with password vyatta and type:

install-image

More detail on doing a "clean install" is available on the How to Install page:  http://www.vyatta.org/getting-started/how-to-install

Upgrading Vyatta Core in a Virtualization Environment

In order to upgrade in a virtualized environment, the Vyatta system must be re-installed. Refer to the "Installing Vyatta Core in a Virtualized Environment" instructions provided at http://www.vyatta.org/getting-started/how-to-install.

Before you go through the clean install process when upgrading, make sure you back up the '/config' directory from your current system if you wish to preserve your Vyatta configuration for restoring on the newly installed system. You will also need to remove 'hw-id' from your existing '/config/config.boot' file before restoring it on the new system and then rebooting, in order to use your existing configuration.