Good day! All,
Welcome back! We recently completely Firmware upgrades on all our c7000/c3000 Enclosures and thought would share all the lesson we have learnt and hopefully this helps some one..
1. Always a confusion on the Order of Applying Firmware to different components on the Enclosures, so below is the order we always followed and it works like a charm
a.Apply ilo Firmware for all the Blades in the enclosure
b.Apply Firmware update for the Physical Blades and if its Windows OS\ESXi apply all the drivers/Firmware as well
c.Apply On-board Administrator Firmware update
d. Last Apply the Virtual Connect Firmware update
2. IF you ever have to replace MidPlane make sure you make a note of the Old serial number and the same number needs to be updated using a putty session by connecting to new On-board Administrator, if you Virtual Connect domain will not connect and all the blades will not power on. A more deep article is out there on internet and also i have posted a article on the same too
3. The best way to do Firmware update on a Windows Server is using HP Support pack
4. While doing physical Servers it always best to copy the HP SPP on to local hard disk and run locally and also if you updating NIC card drivers make sure you keep a copy of old NIC drivers and new drivers handy
5.Always a confusion that when doing NIC card drivers update do we really have to break the teaming and do the update... Well we completed close to 80 odd Physical servers and we did all using HP SPP and we didn't break any NIC teaming and HP SPP is smart enough to update the Firmware. If you closely watch the steps it does, first it updates BIOS/NIC drivers and then it updates the rest..
6. Firmware updates on Windows Clusters you need to be extract careful.. HP SPP worked like a charm expect one instance where the NIC card update got struck and it basically disappeared NIC's from the Server.. so this is the reason to be safer side always make a backup of all the IP Settings and also Keep the NIC drivers locally on the Server.
7. Virtual connect Firmware update, don't use HP SPP because it just takes too long and there is no information at all on the Screen what is going-on on the back ground.. so the safe bet is using Virtual Connect update utility
Note: Firmware update on the Blades need downtime and Firmware update on the Virtual connect you will see packet drops even though you have 2 Virtual connect modules so plan carefully with downtime.
Welcome back! We recently completely Firmware upgrades on all our c7000/c3000 Enclosures and thought would share all the lesson we have learnt and hopefully this helps some one..
1. Always a confusion on the Order of Applying Firmware to different components on the Enclosures, so below is the order we always followed and it works like a charm
a.Apply ilo Firmware for all the Blades in the enclosure
b.Apply Firmware update for the Physical Blades and if its Windows OS\ESXi apply all the drivers/Firmware as well
c.Apply On-board Administrator Firmware update
d. Last Apply the Virtual Connect Firmware update
2. IF you ever have to replace MidPlane make sure you make a note of the Old serial number and the same number needs to be updated using a putty session by connecting to new On-board Administrator, if you Virtual Connect domain will not connect and all the blades will not power on. A more deep article is out there on internet and also i have posted a article on the same too
3. The best way to do Firmware update on a Windows Server is using HP Support pack
4. While doing physical Servers it always best to copy the HP SPP on to local hard disk and run locally and also if you updating NIC card drivers make sure you keep a copy of old NIC drivers and new drivers handy
5.Always a confusion that when doing NIC card drivers update do we really have to break the teaming and do the update... Well we completed close to 80 odd Physical servers and we did all using HP SPP and we didn't break any NIC teaming and HP SPP is smart enough to update the Firmware. If you closely watch the steps it does, first it updates BIOS/NIC drivers and then it updates the rest..
6. Firmware updates on Windows Clusters you need to be extract careful.. HP SPP worked like a charm expect one instance where the NIC card update got struck and it basically disappeared NIC's from the Server.. so this is the reason to be safer side always make a backup of all the IP Settings and also Keep the NIC drivers locally on the Server.
7. Virtual connect Firmware update, don't use HP SPP because it just takes too long and there is no information at all on the Screen what is going-on on the back ground.. so the safe bet is using Virtual Connect update utility
Note: Firmware update on the Blades need downtime and Firmware update on the Virtual connect you will see packet drops even though you have 2 Virtual connect modules so plan carefully with downtime.
Good stuff! Thanks!
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