MSA1500CS - Controller Swap Procedure

[prxhi]

I have MSA1500CS enclosure with one MSA1000 Active/Passive controller servicing 3 MSA30's w/U320 disks.

The current MSA1000 controller has old firmware, I would like to update this with the least amount of downtime.

I have a spare MSA1000 on the side that has updated firmware.

Can I power off the MSA1500CS, remove the controller with the old firmware and plug in the controller with the new firmware then power it back on? Am I correct to assume that the LUN/Profile/ACL information that I configured through the CLI via console is saved on the disks and not the controller? I just want to be sure I don't lose any data when doing this swap.

My next question is on whether or not I can clone the firmware from the new controller to the old controller after this is all done so that I can use the old controller as a backup in the future.

[Jonathan Benavides · Accepted solution]

First remember that before any FW update or configuration change you should do a back up of the data, and to stop all I/O to the MSA volumes.
Additionally it is good to have a show tech_support from the controller to document your existing configuration.

All the configuration data and array information is store in the disks, so any controller should be able to read it.

The way I would do it is using the single controller first, and updating it to the latest FW level, you can go to 5.30 if you have 4.24 or later. It can be done from a Windows or Linux host accessing the MSA, or through the Command Line Interface of the MSA controller.

The other option you said, shutting it down and replace the one with old FW for the other controller when it is off, could work, however this could cause issues if the Firmware versions are very different, or for different types of redundancy A/A and A/P. And in the end, you would still have a controller with outdated FW. Remember to swap the Cache memory modules, or at least make sure they have the same amount of memory.

After the controller is up to date and running fine, you can decide what to do with the other controller. The MSA 1000 has a clone FW feature so if you insert the second controller and the FW version is different it will clone the latest to the other one.

I am not sure what you meant by use it as backup in the future, if you meant have it out of the array, just make sure they have the same FW; or the other option that is using the MSA 1500 with dual controllers and redundant paths to the servers, in which case, you will need an additional Fibre IO module, switch and redundant HBA's in the server, and Multipath software, to have both controllers up all the time for redundancy.

[prxhi]

Thank you and sorry for the late response.

In the end, I was able to get my hands on a spare MSA1500cs enclosure that I used to update the firwmare on my spare MSA1000 controller via cli. Then, I popped this controller into the second slot on my production MSA1500cs enclosure, restarted, and accepted the message to clone the firmware. Once the update completed, the firmware was now up to date on both controllers and I removed one to keep aside as a spare.