Downgrading firmware of disk on MSA P2000 G3

[Helmut Moltke]

Hi,

We had recently a disk crash, so we received a new disk from HP (HP P2000/MSA2000 600GB 6G SAS 15K rpm LFF Dual Port Enterprise Hard Drive, ST3600057SS). As the new disk didn't have the same firmware (we had revision 0006, it was revision 0008), we had to take the servers on the MSA to update the firmware of all disks.

It isn't possible to downgrade/upgrade a disk firmware as it is an offline process. There should be no I/O activity.

As we have only one MSA P2000, we can't downgrade the firmware on an other P2000 environment. Is there an other way to change the firmware to avoid downtime?

Thanks,

[Jan Soska]

Hello Helmut, what is exact version of your MSA array? What is HP Part number of new drive?

I did many firmware upgrades online with low IO trafic - there was no problem. Why do you consider this upgrade as offline only? Even on higher class arrays is recomended to do upgrades in low IO time period...

Jan

[Helmut Moltke]

Hi,

We have a MSA P2000 G3 FC (AP845A) with an extra enclosure (AP843A). The disk has P/N AP860A (HP P2000 600GB 6G SAS 15K rpm LFF Dual Port Enterprise Hard Drive).

In "HP StorageWorks MSA2000 G1 or G3 and P2000 G3 FC MSA - Best Practices", http://www.scribd.com/doc/47001741/HP-MSA-Best-Practices#page=56:

1. Disk drive upgrades on the HP StorageWorks P2000/MSA2000 storage systems is an offline process. All host and array I/O must be stopped prior to the upgrade.

2. If the drive is in a virtual disk, verify that it is not being initialized, expanded, reconstructed,verified, or scrubbed. If any of these tasks is in progress, before performing the update wait for thetask to complete or terminate it. Also verify that background scrub is disabled so that it doesn’tstart. You can determine this using SMU or CLI interfaces. If using a firmware smart component, itwould fail and report if any of the above pre-requisites are not being met.

3. Disk Drives of the same model in the storage system must have the same firmware revision. If using a firmware smart component, the installer would ensure all the drives are updated

As you can see, you should take all the hosts offline.

[Prakash Singh_1]

You can also try the HP Guided troubleshooting tree for MSA storage systems. Link for the same is below:

http://h20180.www2.hp.com/apps/Nav?h_pagetype=s-905&h_lang=en&h_cc=in&h_product=1143841&h_audience=smb&h_client=s-h-e010-1&h_audiencerestrict=true&lang=en&cc=in

[Torsten.]

Disk Firmware update is an offline procedure, but this kind of downgrade would be an offline procedure too.

So better update them:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=4118559&swItem=MTX-514593ab4f8042e0b9d5324a9f&prodNameId=4118560&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=1

[Helmut Moltke]

Torsten, I agree. But this meant for us nearly 35 minutes waiting to upgrade 16 disks on the MSA... Downgrading one disk would cost 5 minutes (1.5 per disk + overhead for software setup).

HP should have an alternative, as we had nearly 1 hour of downtime (stopping servers, updating disk firmware, restarting servers)!

[Torsten.]

When upgrading the firmware of all disks the risk is IMHO if a disk needs too long to come back it will be seen as bad for the moment and the spare kicks in. If this happens to more than one disk you have a serious problem. I think you minimize the risk if you update one by one and wait a moment before starting the next update.