topic C7000 OA firmware compatibility in BladeSystem - General

C7000 OA firmware compatibility

ivaideanu — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 12:22:06 GMT

Hello everyone,

I've been maintaining two C7000 enclosures for quite some time now and I shamefully admit it's only very recently that I've learned about the firmware compatibility matrix, which I've been able to find at http://h20566.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=3682822&calledBy=Search_Result&docId=mmr_kc-0100204&docLocale=en_US (I guess I've always assumed "infinite" backward compatibility...)

Our two enclosures have been running OA firmware 4.30 since shortly after the version was released and we encountered absolutely no issues no far, even though we have a pretty large "population" of BL260c G5 blades (for which the link above states a "maximum version" of 4.23 for the OA.

The questions are: should we downgrade the OAs to 4.23? and: is there any risk in going forward (4.40 and future versions, when released)?

Thank you.

Re: C7000 OA firmware compatibility

Torsten. — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 12:54:40 GMT

Even if I did not find such statement, I'm pretty sure the matrix is showing tested combinations. Since G5 is around EOL, they are not tested against newer versions hence the maximum is the last tested 4.2x version.

I assume if critical issues will be found, there will probably a new version let's say 4.24 with a fix, so you did not really stuck with an old version. In terms of support you are running an unsupported version.

Here you can see version 4.23 has a newer release date than 4.40:

http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?sp4ts.oid=1844083&swItemId=MTX_dc5dc1fa9051424caa148ee23a&swEnvOid=4064#tab-history

Re: C7000 OA firmware compatibility

ivaideanu — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 14:01:34 GMT

Ooopsss, I missed that entirely (I mean the release date chronology) - in this case it seems a good idea to go for 4.23, and the questions become:

- is this straightforward, or will the OA complain about updating to a lower version?

- does 4.23 include (all or part of) the enhancements in 4.30 and 4.40?

- if not, does it at least include the up-to-date bug fixes?

Thanks again.