Oh, I hate upgrades...Pt 2
Well no upgrades happening this weekend due to compatibilty issues and trying to schedule down time for servers.
Due to a lack of foresight by the powers that be, we do not have a scheduled period where we can take servers down for maintenance, to my mind this needs to be set in stone in the following way "between x time and y time on this day you need to expect your server to be restarted", this gives us a windows when we don't need to worry about whether data is be imported or worked on and there is no other real activity of note being carried out. Just because it is there doesn't mean we will use it, but it is nice to have the opportunity without jumping through hoops trying to get permission from a bunch of system owners to update drivers and reboot a server.
This time it was both VMware and EqualLogics updates that needed to reboot servers.
Some of our servers have direct attached iSCSI drives on the EqualLogic, these run the HIT kit and since version 5.0.2 of the firmware only the most recent 3 versions (3.4.2, 3.5.0 and 3.5.1) of the HIT kit are supported, 5.0.0/1 supports only 3.32 and 3.4.0. if you are still using the 4 series the latest 4.3.8 firmware (January 2011) supports just about everything (3.1.2, 3.2.0, 3.3.0, 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.4.0, 3.4.1, 3.4.2, 3.5.0 and 3.5.1). Now what this probably means is that Dell haven't tested with any other versions, however, at one of our sites where they have a mix of old and new HIT kits they have reported issues with the VSS snaps during backups. The backup software talks to the storage to perform a snap and mounts that snap, in the case of iSCSI drives it does this through the HIT kit so I guess having a version that is not supported could be a bad thing. Nothing is certain and I haven't done a full check but it is a bit of a worry so I am not doing any upgrades until I have got all the HIT kits to the latest version.
If you need a copy of the older versions of the firmware you will need to contact Dell support as they no longer supply them on the website.
VMware will also need to reboot servers for a couple of reasons. Updating the Virtual Center to 4.1 should be OK, but to update the hosts will mean vMotioning a bunch of servers, which for the most part is OK as we have per-processor Datacenter licenses on all our hosts, unfortunately due to restrictive licensing on our standard SQL licences we can't vMotion any of our SQL servers so we need to shut the down to upgrade the hosts the sit on.
Thanks Microsoft, I thought your software was supposed to make my life easier not more difficult or is that just a bunch of advertising lies?
As it is desirable to update to the latest VMware tools (read drivers etc) we will need to restart the servers anyway.
Due to a lack of foresight by the powers that be, we do not have a scheduled period where we can take servers down for maintenance, to my mind this needs to be set in stone in the following way "between x time and y time on this day you need to expect your server to be restarted", this gives us a windows when we don't need to worry about whether data is be imported or worked on and there is no other real activity of note being carried out. Just because it is there doesn't mean we will use it, but it is nice to have the opportunity without jumping through hoops trying to get permission from a bunch of system owners to update drivers and reboot a server.
This time it was both VMware and EqualLogics updates that needed to reboot servers.
Some of our servers have direct attached iSCSI drives on the EqualLogic, these run the HIT kit and since version 5.0.2 of the firmware only the most recent 3 versions (3.4.2, 3.5.0 and 3.5.1) of the HIT kit are supported, 5.0.0/1 supports only 3.32 and 3.4.0. if you are still using the 4 series the latest 4.3.8 firmware (January 2011) supports just about everything (3.1.2, 3.2.0, 3.3.0, 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.4.0, 3.4.1, 3.4.2, 3.5.0 and 3.5.1). Now what this probably means is that Dell haven't tested with any other versions, however, at one of our sites where they have a mix of old and new HIT kits they have reported issues with the VSS snaps during backups. The backup software talks to the storage to perform a snap and mounts that snap, in the case of iSCSI drives it does this through the HIT kit so I guess having a version that is not supported could be a bad thing. Nothing is certain and I haven't done a full check but it is a bit of a worry so I am not doing any upgrades until I have got all the HIT kits to the latest version.
If you need a copy of the older versions of the firmware you will need to contact Dell support as they no longer supply them on the website.
VMware will also need to reboot servers for a couple of reasons. Updating the Virtual Center to 4.1 should be OK, but to update the hosts will mean vMotioning a bunch of servers, which for the most part is OK as we have per-processor Datacenter licenses on all our hosts, unfortunately due to restrictive licensing on our standard SQL licences we can't vMotion any of our SQL servers so we need to shut the down to upgrade the hosts the sit on.
Thanks Microsoft, I thought your software was supposed to make my life easier not more difficult or is that just a bunch of advertising lies?
As it is desirable to update to the latest VMware tools (read drivers etc) we will need to restart the servers anyway.
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