VSA dead after 8.1 to 8.5 update

[Rory MacPherson]

Hi,

I've just been attempting to update a VSA from 8.1 to 8.5 and it isn't booting back up. Its just sitting at "uncompressing linux... Ok, booting the kernel" and showing offline in the CMC. Thats been the entire afternoon now.

Is there anything else i can do, or can i roll back the update?

I did update the CMC prior to doing this. The VSA i attempted to update was not the VIP, it was in a cluster of 3 VSA's and a FOM.

Any help would be appreciated!

[Uwe Zessin]

Did you grow the OS disks before doing the upgrade?

It looks like the VSA is dead now and need to be removed from the management group.

[Rory MacPherson]

Hi,

Yea the disks were resized before the update.

I have a few volumes that aren't 2-way replicated.. Is there anyway i can reinstall the VSA but keep the 3rd Hard Disc (ie, the one that actually has the iSCSI data and volumes)?

I'm assuming theres nothing i can do to roll back the update?

[Rory MacPherson]

i'm assuming its not possible that the VSA could just be taking ages to come back - it doesn't need to do anything to the RAID's or anything after the update does it?

[Mark...]

Hi,
I have noticed that the 8.5 vsa always boots gets so far up and then boots again before it is ready the first time it is used/deployed. Maybe it is stuck on the first boot? If so try a reboot.
Mark...

[Rory MacPherson]

Yea, i've since tried a few boots and it hasn't done anything.

So, i'm stick with a dead VSA, and a few Volumes which are offline (they weren't 2-way replicated).

Is there a way i can get this VSA back up and running and not lose any data from the Volumes?

[Mark...]

Hi
Sorry - none that I am aware of but someone else may know better?
If you have a maintenance contract with HP then now may be the time to call them - if you have not done already?
Mark...

[Rory MacPherson]

i've got another VSA running in the cluster now. Of course i'm now stuck with 3 problems:
1) i can't remove the old VSA from the cluster
2) i can't license the new VSA because the HP website is so ridiculous to find historic licenses
3) i can't figure out any way of recovering data from the 3rd drive attached to the dead VSA.

[Rory MacPherson]

I tried updating another VSA - the same thing happened..

works fine through the update etc and when it goes to the stage of powering off the VSA to power up using the new software, it never comes back up.

Just worth remembering for anyone about to do the update - make sure you have things replicated because its not as simple as HP make out..

[mdeller]

I know this thread is kind of old but I ran into almost the exact same issue last night only we were upgrading from v8.1 to 9. I shut down the VSA and increased the disk sizes to 8GB as per the instructions, powered it back up and then started the 9.0 upgrade. In CMC the upgrade got to 37% at which point the VSA rebooted and it just hung there at the same place for a few minutes and then would eventually power itself off. We had added additional virtual CPU's to this VSA years ago to see if it would improve performance any and we left it that way. Upon removing the additional virtual cpus and setting it back to just a single, the VSA booted ok and we were able to complete the upgrade.