Upgrades on a 2 node P4500 cluster with vSphere clients?

[Paul Hutchings]

So there's a raft of updates come down today for both the CMC (the easy bit) and the P4500 G2 and P4000 FOM.

We have 6 nodes total (plus FOM).

4 x P4300 G2 - initiators are Windows 2008 R2 with P4000 DSM.

2 x P4500 G2 - initiators are vSphere 4.1 using MPIO as per the lefthand docs.

How much faith can I have that if I do the upgrade all the sessions will be seamlessly re-allocated to the remaining nodes, and then re-allocated back?

Upgrades when testing are always different to upgrades when in production :)

Thanks,
Paul

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi,

My experience is all positive. I have done every update via the CMC with the servers online. All boxes are upgraded one by one so if the SAN is in a healthy state when starting, you shouldn't have a problem...


Good luck!
Bart

[Jitun]

Not seen any issues/cases so far.

[Jitun · Accepted solution]

But having said that


Warning

Installing this patch will not restart the storage system, but the patch will restart all SAN/iQ services during application.

Unreplicated volumes will become unavailable. Please disconnect unreplicated volumes while performing this upgrade.

Also, performance disturbances and iSCSI connection disruptions can occur while the SAN/iQ services are restarting.

[Paul Hutchings]

Thanks Jitun, sounds like something to consider when we have our bank holiday over here.

I'm assuming the Windows DSM will deal with the cluster update just fine, my only slight concern is how smart vSphere 4.1 is with dealing with individual nodes going up and down.

Fingers crossed but I'd be grateful to hear from anyone else who'd done regular updates on production systems.

[Paul Hutchings]

Appreciate any additional input from anyone who's done updates recently as I'm still wary, perhaps stupidly, of updating our production system - more so the 2 node cluster than the 4 node cluster (we are running a FOM if that's important).