I need to upgrade from brocade 4900's from 5.3.0a code to 6.3.1a code

Is this all brocade fabric ? When you go from 5.x to 6.x you have to change interop mode from 1 to 3 , if you are running in interop mode of course.

Hello,

The upgrade path is dependent on your configuration and what bugs you might possibly be exposed to on the upgrades.   You'll probably need to upgrade from 5.3.0a to 5.3.2c to  6.0.0c to 6.1.2b to 6.2.1b to 6.3.1a but it depends.   Do you do your own upgrades or does EMC Customer Service do them for you?  With EMC CS doing the upgrades they go through change control where we take into account your configuration and known issues that could affect you.

Thank you.

yes it is Brocade and no I am not operating on interop mode (thank goodness)

Ken --

yes all these host are dual path there is one AIX server that does not have powerpath installed.  If I was unable to get that installed what would be the effect on the host?

I have gotten some advise and they are telling me that I need to go from 5.3.0a --> 6.0.0b --> 6.1.0h --> 6.2.0c --> 6.3.1a

I should keep all hosts active durning the upgrade?

Are there any other gottas I might antisapate? 

Thanks for the help

George

Currently I am performing the upgrades -- see  my response to Ken

I am not sure about the AIX host as i dont know that OS.

Ya  that will be a bunch of step upgrades.  since you have so many upgrades to do,  if you have a small time window to do this in then you might want to think about powering all the host down.  That way you can be doing upgrades on both switches at the same time instead of alternating back and forth.  your probally looking at around 20-25 min per upgrade.

Powering it down will also allow you to physically move the switch with out worring about host data.

First are all host dual homed?

If i remember right,  to get to  6.3.1a from where you are at may require a step upgrade approach.

You may need to go from 5.3.0 - 6.1.0 and then 6.1.0 - 6.3.1a.

You will need to read the realease notes for 6.3.1a.  it will tell you the minimum version you can upgrade from.

Also,  if you do have to do a step upgrade,  you would want to upgrade one switch to the first step and then the other.  this will keep each switch within 1 level of major firmware release.

As for relocating the switches,  if all your host are dual homed,  i would first complete all the firmware upgrades and then when your I/O is very low, you can shut down one switch and move it.

But it all dpends on if your environment is dual homed...

And always save your configuration before you start.

i went through this on brocade 4024 switches, went from 5.x to 6.x. Did it online, one fabric at a time. Since i had to step through so many upgrades i went ahead and disabled ISL ports during the upgrade ..did not want the switch to keep joining the fabric ( does not apply to you if you only have one switch in the fabric). Make sure there is plenty of space on the secondary partition or the upgrade will fail (login as root and run df -h). Once we did fabric A, we had our system admin verify that Powerpath recovered, one Linux box did not recover the path automatically ..had to run:

echo "1" > /sys/class/fc_host/host0/issue_lip

echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan

on that path and then powermt config to bring it back under PowerPath control. Only then we proceeded with the second fabric. No AIX on this fabric but without PowerPath or native MPIO i would bring the box down.