Patent ID: 7937699

Claim:
A computer implemented method, comprising: determining that an upgrade of a network appliance is to be performed using versioning information obtained from the network appliance and using upgrade versioning information; determining whether to upgrade the network appliance by using a full install image or by using one or more patches, wherein the determination is made automatically based on upgrade criteria comprising at least one of: (a) whether applying one or more patches will result in a safe upgrade of a particular version of the network appliance, (b) whether a number of revision levels between a current revision level obtained from the network appliance and a desired revision level exceeds a predefined threshold, (c) whether one or more patches are unavailable for a particular version of the network appliance, and (d) whether one or more previous attempts to upgrade one or more network appliances of a particular version using one or more patches were unsuccessful; and if the network appliance is to be upgraded using the full install image, downloading the full install image to the network appliance to upgrade the network appliance using the full install image.