The Grumpy IT Admin

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...

Hopefully if plans go well I will be doing a bunch of upgrades this weekend. Firstly I will be doing the EqualLogic firmware, which, due to some rather buttock clenching moments, I have got different versions on a couple of our systems so I need to get them all in line. I will probably go for 5.0.5 rather than the latest 5.0.7 as it has been out for a while and seems to be relatively safe and as I get older safest seems more bearable than latest. This also means I need to get all the iSCSI connected servers on to the latest version of the HIT kit which is always a worry as most of these are physical servers so you can't just snapshot and then roll back if there is a problem, I will probably pull one of the mirrored system drives before updating to give a quick recovery if it all goes horribly wrong. The other is an update to do is VMware up to 4.1, this is a straight forward thing for the most part, however it is made more problematic by the need to update the VMware tools on ...