Implications of having different versions of disk firmware on the same EVA Disk Group

[Abdul Rashid]

Hello,

Does anyone know what are the implications of having different versions of disk firmware on the same EVA disk Group. If there is no impications how far apart can the versions be.
Also what are the recommendations of updating the disk firmware. We have a fully populated EVA8100 and every time a disk is replaced, the new disk may come with a newer firmware.

Thanks

[IBaltay]

Hi,
here is the disk firmware bundle which can be applied to see if you are ok with the EVA disk firmwares. It automaticaly selects the appropriate firmwares to the relevant disks:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=3351789&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3302267&swLang=13&taskId=135&swEnvOID=54

[McCready]

Usually, every time you upgrade your EVA, your disk firmware gets upgraded (in a different step) to the latest, or minimum level, required by that version of the EVA firmware.

Although you can always find a previously unreported bug, I've never seen an avisory saying that a newer version of disk firmware was incompatible with an older version of EVA firmware.

[Abdul Rashid]

Thanks for both responses. I do have the link to the EVA disk firmware bundle, but our main problem is due to the nature of our business, we can not upgrade the disks on our live systems appart from the quaterly 3 hour down time that we are given, (even though the upgrade process can be done online). So just wanted to know if there were any risks of having mixture of older and new disk firmware in the same disk group.

[IBaltay]

Hi,
you dont need the downtime for the this kind of EVA disk firmware upgrades - they are fully online, the process takes only one disk a the time, there is no risk of the double disk failure after the firmware upgrade, it is a background operation and therefore it takes longer time, but during the production IO...