C7000 OA vs ILO vs Virtual Connect Flex-10 firmware versions

[Scott Farrand]

I have several questions and I'm uncertain if this is the BEST way to get answers, but here it goes...

I have a pair of C7000 chassis with a pair of Flex-10's in each chassis.  Good or bad, the Flex-10's are stacked together between the two chassis... so there's 4 unit's that need to be updated.

The Flex-10's are currently running 3.60 firmware, the OA's are running 4.30 firmware.

What is the "BEST" method (least down time, least pain) to upgrade from 3.60 to the latest version (I believe it's currently 4.45)?   (and SHOULD I be stepping them to 4.45?)

Last time I was looking into this, we were running 3.18 and 4.10 was the latest version, and I was told conflicting upgrade paths... one was to step directly from 3.18 to 4.10, the other was to step through every intermediary version... AND that the OA and ILO versions wouldn't function properly if the Flex-10 version wasn't the correct version.. And when we finally performed the upgrade from 3.18 to 3.60 the network cards on the blade servers freaked out and resulted in a several hour recovery process.  In some way's it feels like voodoo computing here...

Is there any problem if the OA and Flex-10's aren't running the same generation of firmware version? Does the ILO card firmware matter in this situation?

I remember before using VCSU to perform the update, but that it required the actual Administrator user instead of an sub user assigned all priviledges... Is that still the case?

[Torsten.]

First check this for minimum / maximum versions depending on your blades:

http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=1844143&docId=mmr_kc-0100204&lang=en-us&cc=us&docLocale=en_US

[Scott Farrand]

All of the blades in our system are BL460c-G6 units... looks like OA - 4.50 and VC 4.45...

[Torsten.]

As long as you don't have old VC FC modules, yes.

You may consider ti use either HP SUM (SPP2015.10) or vcutil (version 1.11.1) to update.

[Scott Farrand]

Between the two chassis, I have 4 OA's, I have 4 flex-10's, and 4 Brocade 8GB San Switch modules...

[Scott Farrand]

So, I should be able to just bump these from 3.60 to 4.45 directly?

using something like:

vcsu -a update -i 10.1.1.1 -u Admin -p pass -l C:\flex10\vcfwall445.bin

(Seems to me that this would perform a health check, and then update each Flex-10 module in order?)

[Server-Support]

@Scott Farrand yes, I'm in the same situation as you as well.

I'm on Virtual Connect v 4.01 and have seen the document in http://vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/recipes/HPE-VMware-Recipe.pdf on page 7.

However I wonder if there is any testing procedure or health check first that we can run to see if there is any outage or not during the firmware update to 4.45, perhaps @Torsten. can clarify on this matter ?

[Server-Support]

One more thing, as per this article as well http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=3794423&docId=emr_na-c04422904&docLocale=en_US it would be best to upgrade to v4.45 because there is potential bug in v4.30.

Let us know how you go with the upgrade @Scott Farrand.

[Scott Farrand]

I was expecting and preparing for an outage for this update.

[Server-Support]

Cool, @Scott Farrand so how did you go with the firmware update ?

What happens during the 4.45 upgrade ?