P4300 F/W upgrade question.

[DJMC]

Hi,

We a about to do a complete firmware /Software upgrade on our HP Lefthand P4300 array.

We are currently running version 8.1 of the CMC, we have two clusters with a total of 6 nodes.

My plan would be to upgrade the CMC to 9.5 first and then push the SAN/IQ out to the nodes.

Then use the smart start DVD to upgrade the BIOS etc on each of the nodes.

As each of the nodes is upgraded it will be taken offline and rebooted, I assume it will need to do a resync when it comes back online again, and I will have to wait until this finishes before doing the next node?

Can anyone who has done this before tell me how long the process took?

Thanks in advance,

D

[paulfagg-nis]

I am just about to do the exact same thing :)

I have a mixture of old DL320s and P4500s

I have just upgraded all the BIOSes first, and will now start on the SAN/iQ upgrade.

The BIOS upgrade took me about a hour a node, I downloaded HP Smart Update 9.30 and used the image with the ILO, booted and upgraded.

I upgraded the ILO to 1.82 via the ILO console, once upgraded SAN/iQ to 9.5 willt hen upgrade that to 2.07

[oikjn]

that all depends on how much your data chages. It takes about 3 minutes to upgrade the node and it is offline during that process so depending on how much happens during that time and what your internal bandwidth is set to will determine how much time the process takes.  Everything is totally automated into the CMC so I understand the reason for being extra cautious, but the CMC upgrade process will handle everything without taking the SAN/iQ offline.

Running 8.1 is rather old.  I don't know why you aren't keeping the software up to date, but if this is the only update you are going to do for the next few years, you might want to wait until v10 comes out to upgrade to that and just skip v9.x completely.

[DJMC]

Thanks for the info.

When you upgraded the nodes dis you have to wait for each node to resync before upgrading the next one?

[oikjn]

the CMC handles the complete process.  YOU don't have to wait and upgrade the nodes individually, it will upgrade one, then upgrade the next and so on down the line.  The drawback (and it does warn you, but not as boldly as it should) that during the entire upgrade process you will have to keep that instance of CMC running, but it will lock it out so you can't actually do anything with the program until it completes the full process.  As long as this isn't done during a high load time, it takes me about 5 minutes to upgrade my four nodes... done it a dozen times with every patch from 8.5 through 9.5 without issue.  That said, its always good to have a solid backup before the process begins :)  For me, I also have a remote snapshot and will complete that remote snapshot in addition to the backup in case something goes really wrong I have an even quicker path to get things back online.