EVA6100 Drive Firmware upgrade?

[Cameron Todd]

Hi,

I have an EVA6100 with 8 cabinets(112 drives). The firmware revisions reported (even though all drives are either brand new or one year old) vary as follows:
18 disks have HP00,
52 disks have HP01,
1 disk has HP02,
30 disks have HP03,
1 disk has HP05,
10 disks have HP06.

The only firmware updates that have ever been done were the HP installation services when the unit was new and the additional disks added recently by HP.

We are about to receive a new EVA6400 and I have been told that we need to have the firmware on the current unit updated to the latest before adding the new unit to our SAN.

Does the drives' firmware versions need to all be updated? Can I do the firmware update myself? Can the firmware updates be done while the unit is on-line and under load or do we need to schedule an outage?

[Rob Buxton]

You download a bundle of software and make it available via CV.
You can do it online, but I'd recommend picking a quiet time.
And yes you can do it, it's fairly painless.

[Uwe Zessin]

You can do a firmware upgrade as long as there is no VRAID-0 data in a disk group (well, CV-EVA V9.2 is supposed to allow it...- make sure you have a good backup, although I have never seen a disk drive going bad during an upgrade).

Now, don't expect that all disk drives will end up with one common revision level (e.g. "HP07"). There are often different images for different model numbers and an upgrade is only made available when it is necessary, not to create one common version number.

[Marcus Schack]

Also, remember to do your brand new unit also. It is good practice to always run the firmware file against any disks coming into your environment. Just to re-iterate the other comments, pick a time of low I/O and don't rush it. It takes the time it takes :)

[Cameron Todd]

The HP installation/delivery team will be doing the firmware updates to the drives and controllers on the new EVA6400 when it arrives as part of the purchased services, however, they are advising us that the existing EVA6100 and associated SANswitches will need to have firmware upgrades done first before the new unit can be merged to the existing fabric (no analysis of existing firmware versions has been done by them though - it is an assumption) and are asking for a separate work contract (ie money, thousands of dollars in fact) to spend a couple of days doing that.

[Marcus Schack]

They are going by HP Best Practices. I am "an ol' HP Storage Guy" and I would agree that this would be the best practice. However, in life there are always options. You could leave your original EVA in its current state if the two EVAs will never meet. I am a proponent of always keeping within 2 revs of current firmware, which is required by your support contract. And, you can actually perform most of this work yourself if you feel capable. It is not rocket science, just requires a step by step approach and a bit of a "Type A" approach. If you want to know more, let me know.

[Torsten.]

Regarding the disk firmware:
There are different disks with same specs (size, rpm), all are the same product, but different models with different firmware.

The disk FW bundle has an index file with details, e.g.

BF07258243 HP03 BF07258243_HP03.lod
(this is version HP03)
BF072D6186 HP06 BF072D6186_HP06.lod
(this is version HP06)
for 2 disks with same capacity and same rpm.

[Cameron Todd]

Firmware update done.

As it turns out, to the HP tech's surprise, only one drive required a firmware update. Every other drive was current. Shows that the firmware numbers are certainly all over the place for different drive internal models.