Brocade 8/24c SAN switch: Does it support an online firmware upgrade?

[chuckk281]

Terri had a questin on whether a firmware upgrade on gthe Brocade 8/24c SAN switch will cause the server to lose SAN connection:

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The HP StorageWorks Brocade Administrator guide states the following, but does this apply to the 8/24c? It is really non-disruptive?

All systems maintain two partitions of nonvolatile storage areas, a primary and a secondary, to store two

firmware images. The firmware download process always loads the new image into the secondary

partition. It then swaps the secondary partition to be the primary and High Availability (HA) reboots

(non-disruptive) the system. After the system boots up, the new firmware is activated. The firmware

download process then copies the new image from the primary partition to the secondary partition.

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Eirik gave us his experience:

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I do roughly 4-6 SAN upgrades a month, both offline and online, and I have never seen the hosts be affected by such a reboot.

The usual HBA-timeoutvalue is 45-60 seconds, and usually you have two paths anyway (at least if it’s a C7000).

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And Brian added a word of caution:

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Beware though on several occasions I have had a B series switch panic on a non-disruptive reboot.   In that case the switch did a full reboot and hosts where logged out of the fabric.  You should have a dual fabric design though and appropriate MPIO\Dual HBA’s to alleviate this as an issue.

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Have you done this? Let us know your experiences.