How do we do firmware upgrades w/o losing disk info?

[john_ ouellette]

If we upgrade our ES45s and Smart arrays firmware, we have been told they may not boot, how do we insure they do boot after the firmware upgrade?

-John

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,

upgrading the es45 firmware has no influence on the diskinfo.
Who told you that the controller would lose the diskinfo? According to my knowledge it saves it on the disks anyway so it would retrieve them from there. We once moved two disks to another slot position and the controller identified them and adapted the logical volumes.

greetings,

Michael

[john_ ouellette]

Sorry I meant the firmware of the smart array. If we upgrade we could have issues per HP support. So I am unclear as how to update the firmware on the raid w/o losing disk info.

thanks!
-John

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,

I still don't get the picture. Anywaym the procedure is described in the installation and user guide on page 1-14 here
http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/products/storage/sa5300a/sa5300a_tech.html

greetings,

Michael

[john_ ouellette]

I believe this is you Michael:




Michael Schulte Nov 30, 2004 19:42:41 GMT points for answer: Unassigned 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

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John,

I assume you would have to do a reset on the controller after firmware update. This would mean a loss of connection to the disks. If you have mounted file systems on them you would certainly get a domain panic. If they are the boot disks you might crash the machine. I wouldn't do it without shutdown.

greetings,

Michael

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

John,

that is indeed me. I was argueing that for a firmware update you would have to shutdown the machine. The author of the thread wanted to do it online. The controller would have to be reset to run the new firmware and when you have file systems mounted that would lead to an advfs panic and may even crash the machine. Other than that I did not suspect anything. This should work.

greetings,

Michael

[Uwe Zessin]

Make a backup of all data before you / somebody else starts messing with the system. Have a 'plan B' if the system does not come up. ANY changes to a system presents a certain risk.

[Mohamed K Ahmed · Accepted solution]

John,

Before making the upgrade you can save the "configuration" of your array on any disk that is not used on the same array.
The data on the disks cannot be removed except with an initialize command (as far as I know). But sometimes when you upgrade the firmware, it is safer to save the configuration on an unused disk then if you ever needed to restore the configuration, you can do it from that same disk.

check the command
init diskxxxxx save_configuration
where diskxxxxx is an unused disk on the array

HTH

Mohamed

[Uwe Zessin]

Mohamed,
the information you have presented is valid for HSZ/HSG storage controllers. A SAVE_CONFIGURATION is only supported on single-controller configurations. If you INITIALIZE a storage-set later-on you will:
- shrink the size of the set to make room for the metadata, which makes data unavailable

This thread, however is about a SmartArray controller. It always stores the configuration data on the disks.

[Mohamed K Ahmed]

Sorry, I thought all the disk arrays are smart...

Mohamed