XCS online upgrade -really?

[Patti T]

The EVA firmware Best Practices says that you can do an Online XCS firmware upgrade, as long as you are aware of the caveats around timeouts.

Does anyone do this? Or do you shutdown all of the servers and then upgrade the EVA?

We are get mixed messages from our local HP field service folks.

We want to upgrade from XCS 6.0 to 6.11 and we have another that is at XCS 5.1 that we want to upgrade to 6.11. Most of the servers are Windows 2003.

Thanks

[Peter Mattei · Accepted solution]

We do have customers that really do it successfully on a regular basis!

I know that some customers do have mixed feelings but I mean we are talking about today, mid 2007 and not 2001 when the EVA came out!

If you are following the rules described in the whitepaper it works fine!
See: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA0-9102ENW.pdf

BTW: cluster testing has been finished as well, expect the new whitepaper in the coming weeks!

Cheers
Peter

[Craig Howe_1]

I think it depends on the type of workload you have.

It does sound fine theorectically but I think if you have applications that don't like any form of latency, then it should not be done online.

Eg: I have had EVA 8ks holding SQL on W2k3 and I would never do it. I had enough problems with latency in a test environment doing the online disk firmware upgrade, let alone the XVCS. The delay is too much...

If you have already completed it, I would be interested in how it went.

cheers

Craig

[Amar_Joshi]

Read through the firmware upgrade documents and guidelines, you will find that there are constrains doing it.

You have to know that there will be an outage on the EVA Controllers when they reload the new XCS image. With the guideline provided by HP, what you do is, increase the time what a host can wait (before it declares the disk dead) and handle the outage. Again !! it's OS related, you have to be careful with Applications, some applications are very sensitive (like SQL/ORACLE) so even OS will not cry during the outage but applications may.

My personal view, better to be safe then sorry, if you are not sure whether your OS and applications can handle this outage or not, better go OFFLINE.