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37 Posts
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1538
December 16th, 2010 11:00
Downtime to upgrade to latest version? I am shocked!
We have a CX-4 that has a Celerra attached to it. It was sold to us as "unified" storage. We wanted to upgrade the Flare code on the CX to release 30 to use fast cache and configure FAST. I was told yesterday that the Celerra also has to be upgraded to version 6 (currently on 5.8?) as part of this.
In order to upgrade the Celerra to the next higher family of code, it requires a complete reboot of both datamovers at the same time which will take about 15 mins.
I was shocked to hear that because
a) I can't get 15 mins of downtime ever
b) I remember upgrading Celerra's in the late 90s and I didn't have to reboot the entire system.
Can anyone confirm that the downtime is truly a requirement for the upgrade?
DanJost
190 Posts
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December 16th, 2010 11:00
I think you can stick on the same 5.6 train as there is a later version that supports Flare 30 - don't know if you can mix that on a unified system though or if it is disruptive. I just upgraded my Celerras to 6.0 Tuesday night - according to my NMS, the DMs were unavailable for 6 minutes. The Clariion upgrades were completely non-disruptive.
Dan
dynamox
9 Legend
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20.4K Posts
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December 19th, 2010 21:00
out of family upgrades have always required that all datamovers (active/passive) reboot at the same time.
Preeti1
25 Posts
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December 20th, 2010 08:00
Thanks Buddy,
We are planning to do the upgarde in JAN your information is helpfull. So far it was planned one of the Friday night but knowing these issues guess we have to work on weekend.
Is all working good once the upgarde was successfull?
Preeti
borninpa
40 Posts
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December 20th, 2010 08:00
Yes, everything is working this morning. Still looking through Unisphere and learning the new interface.
borninpa
40 Posts
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December 20th, 2010 08:00
Upgraded two Celerras this weekend from 5.6 to 6. The first went fine...although the upgrade including flare code took about 6 hrs. THe second upgrade yesterday did not go so well. The Celerra constantly rebooted after being rebooted. Took them many hours to get it up after running fsck on each volume. Downtime was bout 7 hrs. OUCH. Total upgrade process (including the downtime) was about 12 hrs. Senior engineers had to get involved in the process.
Preeti1
25 Posts
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December 20th, 2010 08:00
Is it better than Navisphere? Can we manage celerra and CX together is that true? (thats what I have heard about it)
Uwe-Ud0Mk
37 Posts
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December 20th, 2010 08:00
You make it sound like that a reboot as part of a software upgrade is acceptable for an enterprise solution.
No bashing here. Just stating the facts.
Storagesavvy
474 Posts
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December 20th, 2010 09:00
Unisphere allows you to sign in to a single UI with a unified user/password. Once logged in, you can manage ALL of your Celerra's and Clariions in the same UI. Switching between systems is done by selecting from a drop box and one of the nice things is that switching to a different system is done "in-context", meaning if you were creating snapshots on a Clariion, and you switch to a second Clariion, Unisphere will remain in the same snapshot window. This is really useful for making the same changes to multiple systems.
Compared to Navisphere, it's much more task and wizard based, the tree-view is pretty much gone.
The following whitepaper discusses the tool and has screenshots as well.
http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8017-unisphere-element-manager.pdf
dynamox
9 Legend
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20.4K Posts
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December 20th, 2010 10:00
so am i.
Talked to Isilon folks the other day and their fancy cluster NAS requires full cluster reboot when doing out of family upgrades too. I warn my customers ahead of time, if they can't take any downtime i am gladly selling them block storage of my Vmax and they can run NFS servers with whatever clustered file system they like.
Preeti1
25 Posts
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December 20th, 2010 10:00
Thank you soooo much,
Thank you specially for the PDF ... It is helpfull, and yes it does looks much better than Navi..
Warm Regards and Happy Holidays,
Preeti