2 Posts
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1366
February 8th, 2021 03:00
Equalogic PS6210 firmware upgrade
Hi
I'm planning to update the firmware on a group of 3 PS6210s. They're currently on version 8.1.3, and I want to get them on to the latest version, which I believe is 10.0.3.
The upgrade path for these is 8.1.3 -> 9.0.9 -> 9.1.9 -> 10.0.3
I'm going to use the Storage Update Manager which handles the firmware installation for both the controllers and the disks automatically.
My question is: should I expect any outage to the ESXi hosts/VMs using these SANs? I believe the controllers are updated one at a time, and the traffic fails over to the other controller while the original is being updated? I want to try and avoid having to shut down the hosts and VMs if possible. We have fully redundant networking i.e. each SAN has 2 controllers and each is connected to a different switch.
According to the Storage Update Manager documentation, each array has to be rebooted to complete the firmware update, which suggests to me that the entire SAN unit is rebooted, therefore this would cause an outage.
Just looking for some clarification please.
Thanks
dwilliam62
4 Operator
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1.5K Posts
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February 8th, 2021 04:00
Hello,
The controller firmware is uploaded to both the active and passive controllers. When you do a restart the passive controller is restarted first. When that comes back online, the active controller will failover to the now upgraded passive controller. Then the formally active controller will be restarted bringing that up to the same level. Then you can move on to the next firmware upgrade and repeat the process.
Re: outage. It depends on if you have configured your ESXi nodes to the Dell/EQL best practices doc. Key setting being the login_timeout value. The default is 5 seconds, it needs to be 60 seconds. This will allow the ESXi node to wait for the failover to complete. This PDF has all the best practices
https://downloads.dell.com/solutions/storage-solution-resources/BestPracticesWithPSseries-VMware%28TR1091%29.pdf
Doing the upgrade in an low IO period will also shorten the failover time.
Ideally the VMs also have their disk timeout value extended. For Windows OS's the VMware tools set this. For others like Linux they have to be set manually. Along with the firmware downloads is a PDF "OS Considerations guide" That PDF has info on setting those values.
Regards,
Don
TerrierJim83
2 Posts
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February 11th, 2021 08:00
Thanks Don; I will take a look and see if we have applied those best practices.
dwilliam62
4 Operator
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1.5K Posts
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February 11th, 2021 09:00
Hello,
You are very welcome! Glad I could help out.
don