MSA2040 installing new disks

[Patric Falinder]

We have a MSA2040 with 14 disks installed at the moment. We need to expand with more storage and have purchased 4x new drives which will be a new raid.

The SAN hasn't been updated since sometimes in 2016 (GL220P009).

Do I have to upgrade the firmware before installing the disks?

I tried to download the latest firmware but was promted to link a valid waranty or support so I'm not sure if we only got 3 year care pack or if we got the 5 year one.

[giladzzz]

Hi

The short answer is no you don't have to upgrade firmware and MSA can tolarate different firmware

versions.

it is a good idea to upgrade firmware thought updating disk firmware is an off-line proccess which 

means downtime.

Regards.

[Patric Falinder]

If I want to upgrade my disks firmware and need to put it offilne, is there a way of putting the arrays offline from the MSA, does the upgrade process put the arrays offline automatically before firmware upgrade or do I just have to "disconnect" everything that is using it?

What if there is something trying to access the array during firmware upgrade?

[Shawn_K · Accepted solution]

Hello,

You should stop all host IO during a drive firmware upgrade. That should be done from the host(s). 

You can place a volume on the array in a stopped state, but this should not be done with active hosts. Otherwise your hosts will loose access to their respective storage LUNs.

I work for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The comments in this post are my own and do not represent an official reply from HPE. No warranty or guarantees of any kind are expressed in my reply.

Cheers,
Shawn

[Patric Falinder]

Thank you for your reply. I just upgraded the controller firmware and now I'm going to plan downtime to upgrade the disk firmware before I install the new disks.