Best way to upgrade blade's firmwares

[Siegfried76]

Hi,

Could you tell me please wich is the best way to upgrade blade's firmware on windows?

I know there's firmware cd, but can i upgrade the servers with online firmware bundle?

Can i upgrade them in production?

Is there a white book on C7000 maintenance?

Thanks a lot for your help!

[Cederberg]

Hi!

I found that the best way is to use the firmware maintenance CD to get all of the firmware for the blade. You can upgrade BIOS, ILO and array controller firmware from the Version control agent. But for exampel when you upgrade the array controllers firmware you may need to upgrade the harddrives firmware aswell. This was the case on some of our bl465c when upgrading to array controller firmware 1.80..

Most firmwares have online packages but the firmware is applied only at reboot.. and running the package and then not rebooting feels a little bit iffy to me.

[Siegfried76]

Thank you!

[Igor Karasik]

You can deploy firmware with HP BladeSystem Online Firmware Bundle for Windows as well
http://tinyurl.com/97zge8

Deploying fimware with BladeSystem Online Firmware Bundle is very similar to deploying Proliant support pack.
Of course you still need to do restart...

BTW, both Online Firmware Bundle for Windows
and BladeSystem Firmware Deployment Tool
(http://tinyurl.com/9pw7dz) contains hard drives firmware as well

[Siegfried76]

Thank you Igor,

Can i upgrade firmwares and reboot later?

[Igor Karasik · Accepted solution]

>>Can i upgrade firmwares and reboot later?

Yes, you can.
You can run online firmware update bundle during daylight hours and schedule restart on the evening/night.

[Adrian Clint]

And VERY Important.

1. Update the BIOS & ILO before you update the OA
2. Make sure the BIOS, ILO and OA are in these supported configurations.
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class-compmatrix.html

Having servers with old BIOS and ILO firmware with newer OA firmware can cause connectivity and powerup problems when you add, move or reinsert servers.

[Siegfried76]

Adrian, Igor,

Thanks a lot for your help!

[Siegfried76]

Igor,

There is no problem to update firmware in production? Network won't shutdown?

Thank you a lot!

[Igor Karasik]

>>There is no problem to update firmware in production? Network won't shutdown?

If I remember correctly you will not lost network link during NIC firmware upgrade.

Proliant support pack upgrade (NIC driver upgrade) is more problematic - from my experience sometimes all your NIC's are disabled/uninstalled during PSP upgrade (it happens with regular Proliant servers as well, not only with Blades) and you need to reinstall all NIC's and redefine all TCP/IP settings.... Therefore I always schedule PSP upgrades druing non-working hours.