HP 5130 firmware upgrade without reboot

[Duncan Phillips]

Hello all,

We have a number of HP 5130's on our network with a few of them in our data centres at TOR switches with a number of servers hanging off them. It's a bit of a nightmare getting the 5 minutes downtime to schedule a reboot of the switches when we need to upgrade the firmware, even when that outage is at 3am. Does anyone know if it is possible to apply the firmware without having to reboot the switch so there is no need for an outage? If so, does it cause any issues with dropped packets etc.

Thanks in advance.

Duncan

[VoIP-Buddy]

Duncan,

Unfortunately, there isn't any way to do an in-place firmware upgrade on the switches.  If you have some in an IRF stack, there is a feature called ISSU that can do that... sort of.  It's not the be all and end all.  It depends on the compatibility of the release you are on and the release you upgrade to.  Not all Comware versions or switches are capable of doing ISSU.  The 5130 should be able to do it.

The best practice would be to dual home your servers so that they could tolerate the loss of one switch at a time while they reboot.  Dynamic Bridge Aggregation would do the trick with a link on each switch.

If that isn't possible, you'll need that brief maintenance window to reboot the switches one at a time.

Sorry.

David

[Duncan Phillips]

Thanks David,

All of the servers already have dual (or quad) connections to the switch stacks but a scheduled reboot in the middle of the night causes all the units within a stack to restart. We've had problems with HP / 3Com stacked switches that won't stack if they have different firmware versions.

I'll investigate the ISSU you mention.

Duncan

[VoIP-Buddy]

Hi!

Well that's interesting.  ISSU will choreograph rebooting one switch at a time and also staging the new code in the process.  You must have some of the old 3Com 5500G type switches with XRN connections on the back.  I didn't do much with them but the newer stuff is different.

Good luck!  If you have any ISSU questions let me know.  Also check out the release notes for the version you want to upgrade to as they usually have a whole section on upgrading with ISSU.

Regards,

David