Best Practices Firmware Upgrade

[philippe.bosle]

Hi Togheter

We are having an UCS environment with 6 chassis and are using the version 1.4(1j). Now we are planning to upgrade to 1.4(2b).

CISCO recommends the following order:

1. If you don't have a host firmware package: Adapters/BIOS/Boardcontroller/FC-Controller/Storage-Controller
2. CIMC direct or via management firmware package
3. UCS manager
4. I/O modules set-startup only
5. subordinary FI
6. ative FI
7. host firmware package

We do have an host firmware package and a management firmware package (which are associated by all service profiles). But when I understand the manual correctly all servers which are associating the host managment firmware package where I want to change the versions, are going to reboot as soon as I save the configuration in the host firmware package.

Therefore I have to ask myself does any company perform an upgrade with an host firmware package? I would love to have an "set-startup" option in the host firmware package. But it is impossible for me to let all servers boot at the same time.

How do you handle that? I am tending now to just set the startup version to those adapters (Adapters/BIOS/Boardcontroller/FC-Controller/Storage-Controller) and upgrade the rest (CIMC, UCS manager, I/O modules, FI).

Kind regards

Philippe Bosle

[kschroed]

We use host firmware packages on all our installations. We create one for each firmware version and we're changing the firmware policy per profile as we get to taking down time one each host.  A new way in 1.4 that was added to help facilitate easier upgrades is the addition of maintenance policy.  By default the maintenance policy is reboot on change, but you can create a new one that is reboot at some time in the future or by user acknowledgement. This makes it easier to stage firmware updates via a Service Profile Updating Template and control the individual servers reboot time.

[philippe.bosle]

Thanks Kenneth for your fast answer. The maintenance policy is indeed not bad. But I miss the point "set startup only" in there. I don't see any sense in the user-ack option. So I just have possibility to create different types of timer-maintenance policies and assign them to the service profiles.

All in all i still prefer the previos described upgrade-stragey where you first set the startup version to the adapters (Adapters/BIOS/Boardcontroller/FC-Controller/Storage-Controller) and then upgrade the rest (CIMC, UCS manager, I/O modules, FI).

As an input to Cisco I would love to have the "set-startup only" option in the maintenance-policy!

Kind regards

Philippe Bosle