All appliances in a management station cluster must be using the same LMI and LSP version. The hotfix level is not verified. This means when upgrading remote appliances they will not be able to join the management station cluster until the management station is also upgraded and vice versa.

Because of this there is not too much advantage to one method or another with respect to the order of upgrading the appliances but there is a slight advantage to upgrading remote appliances first.

If upgrading the management station first then all appliances will lose connection to it because they will have mismatching software versions. On the other hand, upgrading the remote appliances first will allow some remote appliances to continue communicating with the management station until they are upgraded; but that also means the upgraded appliances will stop being able to communicate with it for as long as it takes to upgrade the remaining RAs and the management station. For this reason there is only a slight advantage to upgrading remote appliances first.