Best practice on updating firmware on clustered c7000 enclosures.

[chuckk281]

Taha, in the field, had a customer question:

A customer has two c7000 enclosures, each with two VC-Enet and two VC-FC modules. The current firmware on VC is 2.12, and he would like to have it upgraded to 2.32. The two enclosures have clustered nodes, split across enclosures for redundancy.

He would like to upgrade the firmware on both enclosures, however, he is a bit worried that his cluster nodes might be affected. He would like to proceed with upgrading one enclosure at a time (i.e. upgrading the firmware on one enclosure and then monitoring the behavior for a few days before proceeding with the next enclosure). Is there a recommended best practice for this? What is the best possible approach for this?

Also, would it be better to remove the modules from VCEM before proceeding, or should VC Domain maintenance be ok, keeping in mind that VCEM also has to be upgraded to 1.40.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Vincent provided this answer:

Hi Taha,

• Upgrade VCEM first.
• Then put one domain in maintenance mode, upgrade it to 2.32, exit from maintenance.
• Repeat for the other domain.
• Finally upgrade the domain group firmware mode in VCEM to 2.3x.

If the VC domains are properly configured for redundancy and they are healthy (do a VCSU healthcheck before upgrading), there should be no outage at all.

 Vincent

Has anyone tried this? Any other suggestions? Does this work for you?