topic Upgrade EVA 5000 in Disk Enclosures

Upgrade EVA 5000

Dave La Mar — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 19:36:55 GMT

We purchased and installed an EVA 5000 in March of last year.
Our firmware and software needs to be upgraded.
Currently, our cloning procedures do not use "container" technology which means long delays in deleting clones as well as creating.
The newer firmware/software for the EVA allows for clone creation using containers for which creation and deletion (we have been told) is nearly instantaneous.
My questions are directed to those in the forum that have had the upgrade performed.
1. We are told the upgrade will take 8 hours. What have others experienced?
2. What were other "gothchas" you encountered.

Thanks for any and all input.

No points will be issued until the thread is ready to be closed, thus feel free to add to any posts you see appropriate.

Regards,

-dl

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Mustafa Gulercan — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 01:05:39 GMT

hi Dave;
last month we upgraded the EVA8000 to version 5100.it took just 1 hour.
after upgrading; a problem had occured at command view eva V5.0
But not a big problem it was.(a http problem.)

regards;
mustafa

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Dave La Mar — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:24:34 GMT

All -
I should have stated:
We are currently on VCS 3.025 which is EOL.
We can upgrade to VCS 3.028 with minimal down time.
We were told we need to get to VCS 4.XXX in order to take advantage of the use of containers, but that would mean an 8 hour time.
That said, anyone have experience in the down time required to got from VCS 3.XXX to VCS 4.XXX?

Thanks.

-dl

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Mark Poeschl_2 — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 12:24:01 GMT

We haven't actually done it yet, but from what I've heard the big increase in downtime required is that ALL your servers have to be converted to run a driver that supports active/active. For current versions of Tru64 and OVMS it's a no brainer because the native OS driver is already there. For anything running SecurePath you have to convert to MPIO (Windows), or whatever solution the OS vendor endorses for active/active storage arrays.

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Luk Vandenbussche — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 12:36:40 GMT

Dave,

I have done three upgrades to VCS 3.038 yet.
Depending on our environment it can take up from 5 to 8 hours.
The whole environment must be down, because all the drivers and version off the server connected to the san must be upgraded.

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Dave La Mar — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 13:06:39 GMT

This is some good input.
Let me add that we have HP-UX and windows on the san.
I realize the attached servers will be affected by the down time, but I was not aware of driver changes that needed to occur on the servers for the process.
I was hoping someone might have been able to find ways to reduce the down time.

More input please as this is great.

Thanks.

-dl

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Uwe Zessin — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:24:45 GMT

If you want to use Snapclones, then you need an upgrade to VCS V4 firmware. You need to upgrade to VCS V3.028 first.

> The newer firmware/software for the EVA
> allows for clone creation using containers
> for which creation and deletion (we have
> been told) is nearly instantaneous.

A 'Container' is a preallocated Virtual Disk which does not contain any data. You can also turn an existing Virtual Disk into a Container - this saves you from deletion and re-allocation.

> Let me add that we have HP-UX

In that case you need to remove Secure Path (Compaq) for Active/Passive controllers. Licensewise, I think you can replace it with SecurePath (HP AutoPath) for Active/Active controllers, but you now have to deal with all device paths instead of a single pseudo LUN.
Well, if you stick with PVlinks you have to deal with multiple device files anyway ;-)

V4 uses a slightly different cabeling rule. This could result in different device paths.

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Dean Simiana — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 19:29:23 GMT

Hi!,
We recently upgraded our EVA5K from 3.026 to 3.028 t0 v4.004.
We also added a bunch of disk enclosures and disks to the system at the same time.
The outage for us was approx 8hours including the disk work.
As mentioned in a previous post, you will need to update the HBA drivers as well as any HA software you may have (it is advisable).
We only have proliant servers connected, running W2K & W2K03. We had to run a full update of all the Insight agents / foundation packs to ensure we had correct drivers and other utilities worked ok with the controllers.
You may also need to upgrade your Fibre Switch versions. There are reccommended minimum versions for those too. (may be related to the A/A controllers)
We actually took the oportunity to move our hosts form Secure Path to MPIO.
All in all our outage was between 8 & 12 hours including servers; but we took our time to ensure there were no mess-ups.

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Dean Simiana — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 19:32:23 GMT

I should also mention that v3 to v4 is a one-way move. If there is a problem, you cannot roll-back. You need to re-initialise the EVA.
I don't know what the likelyhood of a failed upgrade is, but you should be aware of this to ensure that you have sufficient backups!

Re: Upgrade EVA 5000

Dave La Mar — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 12:49:45 GMT

I truly appreciate all the valued input by those that took the time to share.
I did forget the very basic principle of doing a search before asking for input. When serching for VCS upgrade I found a multitude of hits, many of which reference my concerns.
Thus I am closing this thread and thanking all contributors.

Regards,

-dl