Firmeware upgrade on a large environment

[mourad.boubchir]

Hello, 

we currently have an environment of about 11 Chassis and around 175 blades,

we are discussing a plan of doing a FW upgrade from 2.2.6f to 3.1.2b and I'm wondering if there will be any downside if we do upgrade the UCS Manager, IO Modules and the Fabric Interconnects to version 3.x and then bring the Servers FW  into the same version every time we have an occasion to patch an ESXi server and do a reboot?

we have to take into consideration that not all the blades can be brought down at once so we can only have a pool of around 10 blades to do daily.

most OSs are ESXi servers, as well as few Windows and Unixs.

[Walter Dey]

Yes, do infrastructure first (and I would use autoinstall)

However, before you do this, I would open a preventive TAC case:

Problem Subcategory: UCS-B Upgrade
Problem Type: Configuration Assistance
Software Version: 2.2.6f
Problem Details: Firmware Upgrade 2.2.6f to 3.1.2b please check for any bugs and caveats
Attach »Show Tech» files to the TAC case

Reason: there are some known hardware issues (FI and PS) which could disruptive

Before I would go with all the servers, I would pick one of each OS (Unix, Windows), do the upgrade and then verify.

If ok, go ahead with autoinstall server, assuming that you have a maintenance policy in place, which asks for a ACK, before reboot.