VA7400 Firmware Upgrade to HP19

[Marlou Everson]

We have two VA7400 arrays. We are thinking about upgrading the firmware from HP18 to HP19. A variety of HP 9000s and Windows servers are connected to the arrays.

Has anyone upgraded the VA7400 firmware to HP19 yet? If so, did you have any problems during the upgrade (done by HP, of course)? Or have you had any problems since doing the upgrade?

Thanks,
Marlou

[Karthik S S]

Hi Marlou,

Recently (1 month to be precise) we upgraded our VA7100 to firmware revision HP19 and also upgraded the 18 GB disk firmware to HP10. So far we have not any problems with the array.

Happy upgrading ..!!

-Karthik S S

[Ricardo Rocha]

Hi

I've been during the past months upgrading the VA to HP19 firmware. I had no problem since, and I do really reccommend to upgrade it. This upgrade has four important components:
1- Upgrade to CommandView 1.07 - can now be integrated with ISEE (ask it to HP)
2- Controllers upgrade to HP19
3- LCC (if you have it) upgrade to HP04
4- Disk firmware upgrade (very important!!!). You should really do it.

Depending on the amount of disks you have, it could take up to 3 hours.

Good luck,

Ricardo

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

We have also upgraded to HP19 firmware on 2 VA7400s. One had no problems. The other one lost the LUN map data off one of the disks when the upgrade was done. The only way we were able to recover the map data, so that we had copies on 2 disks, was to insert a new disk into an open slot. The array saw the disk and put the map data on that disk.

Here is the response from HP on that issue:

"We have been able to reproduce a map disk loss on firmware download scenario in the lab. Since then we have changed the HP19/A120 firmware upgrade service note. We have done many tests here that indicate if the map disk firmware is downloaded first (before the other disks) this problem will not appear. Since the service note has been changed I have heard of no further reports of this problem. It appears that this solution has taken care of the problem."

[Marlou Everson]

I just wanted to follow up on the status of the firmware upgrade.

On Sunday, March 21st, HP upgraded our first VA7400 to HP19. Everything went very smoothly. It took 4 hours to do. This time includes the 42 out of 60 disk drives which also needed firmware upgrades.

We did have a problem with our second VA last week. Both the controllers hung and HP had to reset them. The HP19 upgrade is supposed to fix this. The second VA upgrade is scheduled for March 28th.

Marlou

[Marlou Everson]

Thanks everyone for your replies.

The upgrade of our second array also went very smoothly. It took about 2.5 hours to do with 29 out of 45 disk drives getting firmware upgrades.

Marlou

[IT Response]

Hi Marlou, this is Greg,the CE that lives up north. I'm glad that your upgrades went smoothly.