Online firmware upgrades?

[Adam10]

I hope this is in the right forum :)

I have an Itanium system which had a FC card replaced online using OLAR. However, the replacement card has older firmware than my baseline and to upgrade requires a shutdown to EFI.

Why can't the firmware be upgraded online?

It sort of defeats the purpose of OLAR. A cell board can be firmware upgraded after it is replaced!

How do others get around this problem?

I can't really see HP upgrading the firmware prior to the actual replacement. The only idea I can think of is to have a test/crash&burn system which can be used at the time of replacement to upgrade the firmware, then install it into the real system.

Any ideas or comments welcome.

[Ganesan R]

Hi Adam,

What I observed is, HP will bring the cellboard without any firmware upgradations.
Because again they need to either upgrade or downgrade to match the other cellborads on the same server. This is applicable to all hardwares.

Since firmware upgradation is lower hardware level work it has to be done by offline to avoid any unpredictable results.

But also there are some online upgradations available nowdays in the form of patches. It is all depends on the hardware and it's ability to support.

[Torsten.]

Hi,

on most HBA cards the firmware can be updated online.

Furthermore, during the system is running most parts of firmware are "overlay ed" by the driver.

What type of HBA do you have?

[Adam10]

Torsten have a look at the following information. The firmware can't be done online :(

The type of card is:

HP AB465-60001 PCI/PCI-X Fibre Channel 2-port 2Gb FC/2-port 1000B-T Combo Adapter

The firmware for this is located at:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=au&prodTypeId=12883&prodSeriesId=464396&prodNameId=464397&swEnvOID=7&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=ux-36358-2

It is also true for the card below:

HP A9784-60002 PCI/PCI-X Fibre Channel FC/GigE Combo Adapter

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=au&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=421119&prodNameId=421118&swEnvOID=7&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=ux-36358-2

Reading the installation instructions shows it must be done from EFI shell.

Any other ideas/suggestions/comments?

[Torsten.]

Well, you can extract the firmware from the zip file and use fcmsutil to apply the FW online.

See

man fcmsutil