Use of Service Pack for ProLiant with VC Enterprise Manager

[chuckk281]

Mike had some VCEM update questions:

***************

I read with some horror that SUM 5.0.0 is not to be used “if VCs are managed by VCEM.”  Is there some reasonable workaround? This is the first time I’ve seen this, and one of my customers has had an early release of SUM 5.0 for several weeks. The customers with the most firmware pain tend to have the larger infrastructures, and therefore also are likely to have VCEM.

So, again, is there a reasonable workaround and when will SUM 5 fully support VCs in a VCEM environment.

***************

Lots of comments:

*******************

From Michael:

  The firmware best practices recommendation is to use HPSUM 5.0.0 instead of VCSU unless the customer has one of the following conditions:

–      Unhealthy VC modules

–      Non-redundant VC configuration

–      All VC modules are not part of a domain

–      The user wants to select the order of activation for the VC modules

–      The user wants to back-up the configuration before flashing the VC firmware

–      The VCs are managed by VCEM

In the above states, they must use VCSU.  We plan to address the above issues in a future release of HP SUM.

HPSUM uses a special version of VCSU called hpsumcli to update VCs.  HPSUM 5.0.0 also provides dependency checking to ensure the OA, VC and servers are at versions that can be updated and also handles the order of installation to ensure they are updated in the correct sequence.  Using VCSU by itself does not provide this capability.  HPSUM 5.0.0 will also be leveraged by SIM 7.0 to perform VC firmware updates.

    If the VCs are managed by VCEM, they must first be put into maintenance mode before HPSUM can perform the VC firmware updates.  Once they are in maintenance mode, HPSUM 5.0.0 and SPP 2012.01.0 can be used to update them.  After the update, the VCs must be put back into normal production mode.  The comment about using VCSU is if the customer doesn’t want to put the VCs into maintenance mode to perform the updates.  While the VCs are actively managed by VCEM, VCEM will not allow HPSUM to perform firmware updates.  Today, HPSUM does not have the capability to put the VCs into maintenance mode, but it can detect the VCs are managed by VCEM and put a message up indicating the need to manually change the VCs to maintenance mode. 

From Vincent:

It’s probably worth noting that VCEM will not allow more than one domain (per domain group) to be in maintenance at any given time. So don’t expect to be able to put all your domains into maintenance and do a mass upgrade from HPSUM.

From Hongjun:

This is one of biggest barriers of letting customer love VCEM in my humble opinion.

The vision of VCEM is all about central management for tens and hundreds of VC domains.

But there is no easy way currently except to use script to get VC domains upgrade one by one automatically for customers when it’s managed by VCEM. If we are talking about script here, we have VCEM, VCM and HP SUM CLI possibly involved here to get this process working.

*****************

Any other comments or questions?