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Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

 
WajeehRahman
Occasional Advisor

HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

Dear Experts,

 

Probably next week end we will be having firmware upgrade activity by HP enginner for our EVA storage and SAN switches.

 

Now we have THREE Esxi hosts running on two Blades BL 680c G5 and one DL 380 G7. Esxi is 4.0.0. U1 on two blades and 4.1 on DL 380 G7.

 

In all three there are local datastores which are local hard drives of computers and also on all three our storage team provided us with EVA storage datastores. Now for this downtime do I need to turn off all VM's whose Operating System is installed/ residing on EVA  ? because during upgrade EVA will be turned firmware will be upgraded and re-start will occur. My understanding says yes, I need to turn them off.

 

Now say for example, on one of my hosts I have 5 machines whose OS is on Datastore (i.e. LUN of EVA of space 320GB), So before maintainence window I need to turn off 5 VM's, BUT what about Esxi host itself, shall I turn it off as well ? Because the LUN from EVA is presented to Esxi host first, then it is available as storage in host and then we use it for our guests. So, do I also need to turn off my host completely itself ? OR just the VM's which are installed on EVA ? and proceed with down time ?

 

If there is no need to turn off Esxi hosts then in this case I can easily allow all my VM's which are on local datastores continue to work during the downtime window as all VM's on local datastore do not need to access any LUN on SAN.

  

Please let me know if my question is not clear and you need more detail....

 

Appreciate your help.

 

Kind Regards,
Wajeeh

8 REPLIES 8
Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

Hi,

 

for the EVA4400 there is a "HP P6000 EVA Updating Product Software Guide (XCS 11001000) (5697-1491, June 2012)"

 

In this it should say if you need to shut down the hosts. This might depend on which upgrade you are doing. Perhaps if from a really old one it is needed. Often you do not need to shut down the hosts. See the section "managing host I/O timeouts for an online upgrade" in the document mentioned above.

 

If the upgrade takes less than 60 seconds you generally will have no problems on the operating system, as long as the multipathing / MPIO is working. You could test this in advance by restarting a controller :)

 

I don't think you need to shut down the ESX server or the VM.

WajeehRahman
Occasional Advisor

Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

We are not upgrading from a very old one because yearly we have this activity from HP, so last we had upgrade last year in Nov.

 

So, now this year for EVA and SAN switches, but last year I was not part of this activity, so asking if it is required to turn of Esxi hosts OR just shutting the VM's on EVA will allow be to proceed for firmware upgrade.

 

Please see if you can give me some thing based on your experience because it will save my time if I do not turn off any hosts and my VM's on local datastores will continue to work.

 

Regards,
Wajeeh

Wajeeh
Occasional Contributor

Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

Dear Experts !

 

Any Response for my request !

 

 

Another question I have is we have two blades , on these two the operating system is installed on local hard disks of servers which is C:\ drive. The other drive D:\ and E:\ are presented from EVA SAN. During the firmware upgrade of EVA and controllers the EVA will not be available. Mean time before proceeding for down time windows the application which performs I/O on D:\ and E:\ drive will be turned off also so there will be no I/O. So still I need to turnoff the Server while the OS is on local hard disks?

 

Please reply.

Thanks,

 

Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

"During the firmware upgrade of EVA and controllers the EVA will not be available."

 

In a lot of cases it is not necessary to make an offline upgrade. Meaning if you have MPIO/multipathing/FCHBA timeouts set to one minute (or more) then your servers should be able to handle the EVA being unavailable for one minute (which is more than how long a resync/ should take, there are more details about this in the documents I mentioned before).

 

If you want to be extra sure that no I/O is happening on a disk you can unmount it. But again, if you are only losing connectivity to the EVA during the firmware upgrade (and between recent XCS versions) you do not have to turn off the servers/manually stop IO. But, if you don't want to make unnecessary changes to your system I guess safest is to poweroff machine.

WajeehRahman
Occasional Advisor

Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

Many Thanks for reply,

 

So, I will turn off the blades which have D:\ and E:\ drive presented from EVA but their operating system is installed on local hard drive of servers, this will be safest.

 

Just one confirmation from you, for the Esxi servers , only shutting down the VM's whose operating system is installed datastore presented by EVA will be OK? I mean I will continue to run my VM's which are on local datastore and Esxi Server host will also be up during the downtime window, so this will be OK ?

Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor

Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

I don't think you need to shut down anything.

 

But it should be fine to just shut down those VMs on the EVA store yes.. as long as that LUN from the EVA isn't used for anything else by the ESX host.

Scorpianzzz
Advisor

Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

Hello Wajeeh,

As per my experience, I have never shutdown either the ESX host or the guests. You will have to take some precautionary steps before planning the EVA firmware upgrade - like - IOPs should be low (less than 3000), the HBA drivers/the SAN switch firmware and the EVA firmware should be compatible (info could be collected from SPOC). I have performed the activity of EVA firmware upgrade from XCS09522000 to XCS10001000 to XCS11001000 (since direct update to latest was not possible). Hence kindly check the EVA compatibility guide and the EVA Updating Software Guide before planning the activity.

Cheers
Scrozzz...
MilindN
Visitor

Re: HP EVA 4400 Firmware Upgrade, Does it requires to turn off Esxi Hosts?

Dear Wajeeh,

 

I hope you have got solution for your problem till date.

 

It will better to take down time to shut dowm for EVA Firmware updation.

 

I worked with HP EVA 4100 for 6 yrs and I have done thius activity more than 4 times as you said it is yearly schedule.

 

I was using  one extra stand by server where all work load of Application & Database were transfer during this activity.

 

We used 4 HP DL 385 G2 but for windows server as two for apps and two for dbs.

 

So as per my last exp with firmware updation it will required reboot after firmware updation.

 

Thx!!

MILIND N