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.

To configure rollback, you must have network-admin user privileges.

Rollbacks have the following configuration guidelines and limitations:

• You can create up to ten checkpoint copies.

• Your checkpoint filenames must be 80 characters or less.

• You cannot start a checkpoint filename with the word system .

• You can start a checkpoint filename with the word auto .

• You can name a checkpoint file summary or any abbreviation of the word summary .

• Only one user can perform a checkpoint, rollback, or copy the running configuration to the startup configuration at the same time.

• After the system executes the write erase and reload command, checkpoints are deleted. You can use the clear checkpoint database command to clear out all checkpoint files.

• Although a rollback is not supported for checkpoints across software versions, users can perform a rollback at their own discretion and can use the best-effort mode to recover from errors.

• When checkpoints are created on bootflash, differences with the running-system configuration cannot be performed before performing the rollback, and the system reports “No Changes.”

• Checkpoints created using the checkpoint and checkpoint checkpoint_name commands are present upon a switchover.

• Checkpoints are present upon reload unless a write-erase command is issued before a reload.

• A rollback to files on bootflash is supported only on files that are created using the checkpoint checkpoint_name command and not on any other type of ASCII file.

• Checkpoint names must be unique. You cannot overwrite previously saved checkpoints with the same name.

• Rollback is not supported in the context of auto configurations. Checkpoints do not store auto configurations. Therefore, after a rollback is performed, the corresponding auto configurations will not be present.

• Multiple port VLAN mappings configured on an interface during a rollback operation cause the rollback feature to fail.

This table lists the default settings for rollback parameters.

To display the rollback configuration information, perform one of the following tasks:

Use the clear checkpoint database command to delete all checkpoint files.

This example shows how to create a checkpoint file and then implements a best-effort rollback to a user checkpoint name:

checkpoint stable
rollback running-config checkpoint stable best-effort