EVA 5000 Upgrading from 3020 to 3028

[Lee Abell]

I wanted to see if I could get any feedback on people's experiences with doing this. We are running windows hosts both clustered and std, win2k, win2k3, solaris 8 & 9 hosts and hpux 11.0 and 11i hosts. Currently we are at 3020 and have been told we should go to 3028. Going to 4 after this upgrade is out of the question for many reasons. My local hp contact has been sending me some info as far as supported configs, looks like checking driver versions, firmware, bios versions of fibre cards. Everyone knows what a pain this is, some are off and should theoretically be updated. I wanted to know if everyone has upgraded everything on their hosts before doing this upgrade or if some people have deemed this a fairly safe upgrade to leave most things running the way they are??? Any feedback is greatly appreciated... Thanks

[Ivan Ferreira]

Bad news, I had to update everything:

HBA firmware
Multipath software
SanSwitch firmware
Management appliance software
Controller VCS

But anyway, it's good to maintain the revisions updated, so, even being a pain, could help you to avoid future problems, it's a preventive maintenance.

Cheers.

[Basheer_2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Abell,

This was our config (HP-UX, Linux and Windows were connected to EVA-5000)
HP-UX 11.11 and 11.23
WINdows servers
Linux RH AS 4.x
Secure Path 3.0E (we upgraded to 3.0F before the firmware upgrade)

the HP tech will do the firmware upgrade on the SAN ( EVA 5000 had about 118 disks). this took < 30 minutes.
he will also update the Windows Management appliance.

it went smooth for us.

[Jonathan Harris_3]

You shouldn't really have too many issues with drivers, etc, but I don't want to tell you that you don't need to check! Certainly, we didn't bother.

The upgrade to 3.028 is painful as you have to take down all your attached servers. For us, this still hasn't been possible on some of our arrays and so we've still got some EVAs on 3.025.

Still, 3.028 will be the last release for that series, so once you've done it, that's it.

[Lee Abell]

Thanks for all the input. It just seems like some of these items would be okay if they currently run fine... Like on my hpux servers I have some showing they need pdc upgrades, which last time I checked a field engineer had to perform and one of these systems is a dev box that isn't under a contract... And some of the windows boxes are at like 5.5.20a2 for the driver and the sheets showing reqs say they need 5.5.30a2.. and it's like, well, does it really matter, etc... Especially since most of our windows boxes are clusters and I just don't want to break the cluster by messing with drivers for luns... I know that's a possibility.. Thanks for all the input... Sounds like one of those situations, where really it shouldn't matter for some of these items and they give you the "tested" config... so any variance could pose a problem... Thanks Again..

[Jack Trachtman]

Jonathan mentions that 3028 is the last FW version for the EVA5K. I thought that versions 4.x and 5.x were also available. Can anyone clarify this? Thanks

[Lee Abell]

It's the latest in that series as he says.... latest of the 3's.... Which I believe the 3.028 will be supported forever basically...

[Jeffrey Goodwin]

There is a 'newer' V3028 release that has updated EMU and disk firmware. In addition, V3100 should be out soon that has the newer EMU/Disk firmware plus (I think) online disk firmware upgrade capability.

-Jeff

[Pat Obrien_1]

The upgraded version of 3.028 is referenced by my field people as 3.028 plus. You can only get this if you have an issue that gets escalated to engineering and they bless the upgrade. It consists of newer emu firmware and has a corresponding firmware update file. I have engineering approval for all my eva5k however I am waiting for 3.100 as this has several fixes for escalations I have ongoing.
To the point of 4x and 5X, this is something every site needs to review before blankedly upgrading as I run both 5k and 8k, there are significant changes to some hosts that must occur when upgrading from an active-passive to active-active. I am also very concerned about upgrading a 5k to vcs 4x or 5X becuase this controller only has a half duplex cache mirroring, This could become a performance issue when pushing 500MB/s like I do on eva5k.

[Wilschut_1]

I'd wait for an upgrade to an Active-active configuration since there are some data-corruption issues in VS 4.004:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=130&prodSeriesId=321347&prodTypeId=12169&objectID=c00846658

It is advised to delay the migration-trajects for 4.004 or migrate to 3.100.