topic Re: Upgrading OA firmware in BladeSystem - General

Upgrading OA firmware

Aamir Majeed — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:58:29 GMT

Hi,
I am going to upgrade OA firmware to version 2.31. My concern is, whether firmware upgradation effects normal Blade Server opreations i.e. should servers will remain still running and accessiable over network.

Thanks,
Aamir Majeed Qadri.

Re: Upgrading OA firmware

Siegfried76 — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:59:16 GMT

Hi,

When you upgrade OA, there is just a reboot of the OA.

No downtime for your servers.

Re: Upgrading OA firmware

Aamir Majeed — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:42:56 GMT

Thanks for response, is there any relevant document available mentioning "no downtime is required for servers while upgrading OA".

I will be very thankful for this..

Re: Upgrading OA firmware

The Brit — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:02:26 GMT

Aamir,
Sigfreid is correct. Upgrading the OA's will not affect your server blades. The process will upgrade the standby OA, and then failover. It will then upgrade the remaining OA.

One thing to note, (if you are interested), after the upgrade, you will often end up with OA2 as 'active' (rather than OA1) because the process does not normally fail back.

But note, it really doesn't matter because the failover includes everything, including the IP address. Make sure however that there is physical connection from both OA's to the network switch(s).

Dave.

PS, the same comments are true for the VC modules (if you use them), and that is a much greater 'leap of faith' since all of your server blades are communicating through them to the world and the storage.

I have upgraded both OA's and VC modules while my blades were 'UP' without any problems.