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2867
November 27th, 2017 08:00
Upgrading PS6500 from 7.0.9 to latest and VMware 6.5U1
We have a nest of two PS6500 (10k and 7k2) which are in support and running our VMware clusters (2 clusters each of three R720s). The PS6500 firmware is currently 7.0.9 on both and as we are upgrading VMware to 6.5U1 I am assuming that to keep MEM compatibility we have to upgrade the firmware to v9.1.xx in steps as described on the support site, and install MEM 1.5.
I have several questions:
- I can use the EQL Update Manager to update the offline controller and then fail over to upgrade the second. During the failover time the iSCSI connections will "fail" and have to login again. iSCSI connections are about 250 to each and our IOPS are low (300 peaking to 1k) according to SanHQ.
Q. I'm assuming that we can do this production system upgrade without having to shutdown any VMs? I can shutdown roughly half during our quiet period but other VMs are somewhat essential and I plan to keep them up. (Yes, we have backups!)
2. As we upgrade each VMware host, MEM v1.5 needs to get installed and configured on the host.
Q. Other hosts will continue to work with 1.2 (or 1.3, I forget which) despite the firmware upgrade? If not then I assume the performance will be degraded during this VMware update period?
3. What can go wrong!
Q. I'm assuming that a failover could fail if there was a Controller issue but is there any way to test this in advance? Can I failure over the controllers via the Group Manager to "pretest" the controllers?
Finally I must say that after 5-years of use these PS6500s have just worked (knock on wood).
...Andy
andysibley
6 Posts
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November 27th, 2017 09:00
Don,
First thanks for a very comprehensive answer. We don't often do PS6500 firmware upgrades as you can tell!
I'm in the process of checking the EQL best practices (have technote) and we're scheduling the firmware upgrade either this week or to after Christmas (more likely following your comments on firmware releases). I'll also get familiar with the serial port just in case.
Many thanks...Andy
andysibley
6 Posts
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December 28th, 2017 11:00
Don,
Just to let you (and everyone else) know that the update from 7.0.9 to 9.1.4 was painless using the Update Manager. As you suggested I monitored the controllers via the serial port and there were no issues at all. The serial port does help especially when the Update Manager reports losing connection but you see the activities going on via RS232.
BTW this was on a production system (1st maintenance in >3 years) and although I shutdown the majority of VMs I didn't see any issues with the ones I left up and running.
Many thanks...Andy