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B Series Firmware Upgrade

kinskins01
Level 1
Level 1

I have a chassis with four B200 blades running 2.0(2q) code. ESXi 5 is running on the blades. There are two UCS managers in a cluster and I wish to upgrade to 2.0(3a)

I upgraded the code from 1.4 a few months back but the system was new and wasn't running any VMs at the time so i could reboot at will.

It is now in Production and I am concerned about upgrading while the system is live. Is it possible to carry out the upgrade while the vms are running? I know the blades have to reboot when upgrading certain components but I can vmotion off the VMs for each blade, one at a time.

If someone has experience of this please let me know. The upgrade guide states "no data traffic disruption if the correct sequence of steps is followed"

thanks

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Robert Burns
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

That is correct.  It is possible utilize VMotion to move production VMs around, while you activate the Adaptor and BIOS images (require server reboots).  Assuming you have both SAN & LAN redundancy on each host, the activation of each other component should not impact your production systems (other than a temporary slight performance hit due to single uplinks). 

We always say if you can plan for an outage - do so.  Then carry on as the upgrade guide states to make it as non-disruptive as possible.  Always plan for the worst case.  Over the hundreds of upgrades I've ran, using Vmotion there's been no impact 99% of the time.  That being said Murphy's law kicks in once in a while and s**** happens.  Either a device fails, or I've forgot to test SAN/LAN redudancy before upgrading and it causes an outage.

Ensure your LAN & SAN fabrics are all healthy & hosts are configured for full redundancy and I'm confident you'll be fine.

Regards,

Robert

View solution in original post

2 Replies 2

Robert Burns
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

That is correct.  It is possible utilize VMotion to move production VMs around, while you activate the Adaptor and BIOS images (require server reboots).  Assuming you have both SAN & LAN redundancy on each host, the activation of each other component should not impact your production systems (other than a temporary slight performance hit due to single uplinks). 

We always say if you can plan for an outage - do so.  Then carry on as the upgrade guide states to make it as non-disruptive as possible.  Always plan for the worst case.  Over the hundreds of upgrades I've ran, using Vmotion there's been no impact 99% of the time.  That being said Murphy's law kicks in once in a while and s**** happens.  Either a device fails, or I've forgot to test SAN/LAN redudancy before upgrading and it causes an outage.

Ensure your LAN & SAN fabrics are all healthy & hosts are configured for full redundancy and I'm confident you'll be fine.

Regards,

Robert

kinskins01
Level 1
Level 1

thanks

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