EVA6000 XCS upgrade and Microsoft 2003 cluster

[inex]

Hi,

On some disk systems (f.ex on HDS midrange)when you upgrade the microcode on the controllers, they also change the disk signatures on the lun's and this is causing problems in an windows cluster environment.
Anyone got expirience with xcs upgrade on EVA6000 and MS cluster? The customer has XCS6000 and we will upgrade to XCS6200.

Thanks

-inex

[IBaltay · Accepted solution]

Hi,
you can do the online firmware upgrade to the 6200:
there are several things which are important to know before:
a) the metadata structure has changed from the 6110 to the 6200 so the downgrade is not available online (only restore from tapes)
b) the host hba driver, bios, firmware, multipathing need to be checked for the compatibility with the 6200
c) the disk io timeout value need to be checked to survive the contoller reboot after the firmware upgrade

[inex]

Thanks,
but do you think it will affect my cluster disks?

-inex

[IBaltay]

no, it will be stay unaffected and if i am speaking on the online firmware upgrade it means that there will be even no production downtime...

[inex]

The customer have 2 x EVA6000 with CA and MS 2003 cluster and the plan is to upgrade the secondary site first. Will it be possible to do san switch fw upgrade online and will the CA work when having XCS6000 on one site and xcs6200 on the other?

Thanks for your help.

-inex

[IBaltay]

in general i would suggest to
a) do the controller firmware upgrade on both sides in one day for the supported CA compatibility reasons (as you has written not in parallel but with the start at the secondary site)
b) plan the san switch upgrade for the 2 coming weeks after

not mixing 2 changes in one time for the possible rollback to be as clear as possible

[Steven Clementi]

I look at it a little differently...

I would probably plan to do the SAN Switches first... then some time later... do the EVA's. The upgrades are quick and can be done in a day on the EVA's.


Steven

[inex]

My plan was to do everything in one day in this order

San switches

Upgrade passive nodes in cluster with hba driver and mpio

Upgrade xcs and disk fw on passive EVA

Failover DR groups to passive EVA ans test aplications. Then there will be a switch on DR groups from a EVA with xcs6000 to and EVA with xcs 6200. (do not know if it will work)

If ok, I will do the same on the primary site.

-inex