upgrade Brocade Director and edge switches - what order?

[Patti T]

We are getting ready up upgrade the firmware on our SAN. We have a Brocade 4/256 Director and various Brocade Edge switches, including Blade SAN switches.

What order do we perform the upgrades? Director first and then Edge or the other way?

We have had two different opinions from local HP FS on this.

Also, has anyone upgraded to the lastest 6.x FOS yet?

Thanks,

Patti

[IBaltay]

Hi,
if you have redundant fabrics it is good to do only one whole fabric firmware upgrade in a time to have some time for the evalutation if everything works fine. For the firmware uprade, you have the choice of two firmware lines:
a) 5.3.1a -> the "stable" line latest supported (preferred for the production)
b)6.1.0 -> the new line latest supported

[Stephen Kebbell]

Hi,

I performed a Fabric OS upgrade recently. I upgraded the director first, then the edges. I upgraded only one fabric at a time, and waited until all switches in one fabric were upgraded before starting on the 2nd fabric.

I haven't installed 6.x.x yet, but it's planned. Just remember you have to upgrade in small steps: you can only go one or two minor revisions in one go.
5.0.x -> 5.1.x or 5.2.x -> 5.3.x -> 6.0.x -> 6.1.x

Regards,
Stephen

[Patti T]

thanks for the replies.

We will only upgrade one side of the fabric at a time, and we do know that we have to do it in small steps.

I also found out that we cannot go to 6.x because it does not support our Brocade 3900 or 2/16 Switches!

[Tim Chilton]

Just as an FYI...We upgraded our SAN fabric to 6.x.x and had issues with several servers SAN connectivity. We also had issues where our EVAs were losing thier SAN connectivity if their switchports didn't have their speed hard set. After a day of hell, we rolled the firmware back. When we discussed this with our local HP field guys, they said that 6.x.x wasn't ready for prime time yet.