topic Re: Adding more nodes to a P4300 G2 environment in StoreVirtual Storage

Adding more nodes to a P4300 G2 environment

JLF175_1 — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:22:01 GMT

We currently have two P4300 G2 nodes for our VM environment and we need to add two more nodes soon. I intend to keep them all in the same cluster but am concerned about software/firmware updates.

When I add the two new nodes can I go ahead and add them to cluster so I can have more space and worry about firmware/software updates later? Our storage is getting almost to critically low levels so I want to get the storage expanded and worry about firmware/software updates later.

The current units have software version 9.5.00.1215.0. It appears the upgrades waiting for them are 10.0.00

Thanks

Re: Adding more nodes to a P4300 G2 environment

oikjn — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:40:27 GMT

sounds like a question for support direct.

Any reason you don't want to go up to v10 now? Adding the two extra nodes will not affect anything other than available storage so unless there was a reason for holding off on the OS upgrade I would just do that and then add the two extra nodes... that or talk to support about how to rollback the software version on the two new nodes.

Re: Adding more nodes to a P4300 G2 environment

JLF175_1 — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 19:36:16 GMT

From some of those posts in this forum it appeared there were some issues upgrading to v10.

Also, our available storage on the SAN is very limited (less than 300GB). I was concerened about performing any updates with such limited storage space remaining.

Re: Adding more nodes to a P4300 G2 environment

oikjn — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 22:09:20 GMT

I know there is talk about issues, but the only ones I"m aware of on this forum were the ones from people trying to run G1s on v10 and myself... who had the default gateway reset on each node which would cause the upgrade to hang until I manually logged into each node after it updated to add in the default gateway.

You say limited and 300GB... how many nodes do you have?

I would just call support since you are nervous... you pay them enough for support, you should use it.

Re: Adding more nodes to a P4300 G2 environment

Patrick Terlisten — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 18:05:27 GMT

Hello,

are you sure that the new nodes are already with v10? Simply check it and if they came with 9.5 add them to the cluster.

I would prefer to upgrade the whole cluster to v10. I can't see any cause why you shouldn't update.

Re: Adding more nodes to a P4300 G2 environment

KurtG — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 07:48:08 GMT

You could use the recovery images for the 9.5 version on the new nodes for reverting the new nodes to a lower sw version.

Be sure to document any licensekeys and so on before doing this.

Personally I would just upgrade the one I have to version 10. If you are very concerned about your data you could possible seek a solution by doing a remote copy to the new nodes before you upgrade youre primary cluster. (If everything goes ok you can delete the copy and move the nodes into youre primary cluster).

-- A little bit of work but might give you what you are seeking.

KurtG