to auto install or not?

[Mark Puchalski]

We are preparing for our first UCS firmware upgrade since implementing over a year ago.  We have 10 blades, all B200 M3 between 2 chassis currently.  We are on 2.2(1b) and are preparing to upgrade to 2.2(3d).

Seems like auto install would be the way to go for us - however a TAC engineer today said that while the auto install should would fine, most people in TAC recommend a manual upgrade.  The reason given is that if issues are experienced, then the manual upgrade leaves you in control of what is going on during the process, which can help limit complications.

What do others find is the best method for updating?

[Manuel Velasco]

The auto upgrade is very useful and it is an easy method to upgrade the ucs envirenvironment. Now from experience if anything goes wrong during the upgrade of your environment there is currently not a way to stop the firmware upgrade, meaning that you have to complete the firmware upgrade entired ucs infrastructure or blade blade firmware. With the manual method you have more control over the upgrade and if anything goes wrong you can stop the upgrade to try resolve and understand the problem.

[Walter Dey]

my 2c

- autoinstall has 2 parts: infrastructure (UCSM, FI and IOM) and servers

- autoinstall infrastructure follows the strict time order, e.g. UCSM first,....if you do it manually, you have to know when to do what.

- most of the trouble happens with autoinstall infrastructure, e.g. IOM and/or FI are dead, sometimes autoinstall hangs, which can be recovered by starting it a second time

- autoinstall servers is using Host Firmware Packages (and if you don't use HFP in your service profiles, don't forget that the default is "HFP default"

In my opinion and experience, autoinstall works fine; follow the best practice guidelines

- have a maintenance policy with ACK in place

- if one fabric is updated and wait for ACK: check very carefully, if FI and IOM are up and configuration (cluster state) is ok, before giving the ACK

- HFP for servers does BIOS, I/O adaptor, CIMC update requiring one server reboot; if you do that manually, it requires multiple reboots....

Cheers Walter.