Updating the Fusion-IO firmware…
We were fortunate enough to pick up some Fusion-IO IOcache cards to be implemented in our new infrastructure.
Installed the Fusion-IO drivers on the ESXi box and went to check the cards out. We do a "fio-status" command vis SSH connection to pull the information on the cards in each system.
Towards the bottom, you can see the Firmware listed as v5.0.7 and at the time the current release was v7.1.13. So head out to the Fusion-IO support site (http://support.fusionio.com/), log in with your support account credentials, click on the "Downloads" button, select the card installed, select the OS being used, and look for the firmware menu. Grab the firmware file, should be a file ending with an FFF extension.
Once it's downloaded, upload the firmware to a place the ESXi host can read from. In this case, I uploaded the firmware to a VMFS datastore so I can use the same file for every server.
At this point, we can get the update installing. To do that, SSH into the desired host (remember to have the SSH service running), and issue a "fio-update-iodrive *firmware location*" command.
After about 12 minutes, the install was complete and a reboot was required.
Once the ESXi host was back up, SSH in to the ESXi host and run another "fio-status" command and show that the Firmware is now indeed v7.1.13
If you happen to run into the same issue where the "Active Warnings" indicate a message of: The ioMemory is currently running in a minimal state. The problem I found was that the driver version was incompatible. Check out my other posting on how to update the driver: http://www.thatcouldbeaproblem.com/?p=602
PS Series Firmware – V5.1.1-H2 – Another update!
Just got a nice email from Dell that indicates some people have been having problems during the V5.1.1-H1 update process where it actually freezes! Luckily, I had no such problems with my upgrade to H1
However, I'm still in the lucky situation where I have a PS6500E at my disposal to test with. So it's time to apply the new patch to it and see how things go with this update.
So head back out to the Equallogic Support site: http://support.equallogic.com/ and download the new V5.1.1-H2 firmware and extract it.
H2 appears to be the same size as H1, so far so good.
Open up the Group Manager and login:
Click on "Group Configuration", then the "Advanced" tab, and click on the "Update Firmware" button:
Enter the admin password, select the newly downloaded and extracted H2 firmware and click "Open"
You should see that the EQL is indeed running a different firmware, then click the "Update" button
Watch as the firmware is transferred to the EQL, then as the firmware is processed, then click the "Restart" button and hope for the best!
We see the status go to "Preparing to restart" then to "Offline"
After about 5 minutes of waiting, we see a refreshing "Member is up to date" message in green
Finally for the real test, the effect on the VMware host. Max Write Latency of 2508ms, that's it!
So in review, took about 20 minutes to complete from start to finish and everything worked perfectly and as it did the first go-round. Roughly the same write latency was seen in H2 as was seen in H1. So I'd claim this to be a success. Thanks to the Dell/EQL teams!
Upgrading to EQL Firmware 5.1.1-H1
So if you were like me, you noticed that Dell pulled the v5.1 firmware upgrade for the Equallogics pretty quickly. Then v5.1.1 appeared, only to be taken down days later. Finally, this morning, v5.1.1-H1 appeared this morning!
After seeing all the benefits to the new firmware at the Dell Storage Forum, I've been a bit on the excited side to get this tossed on some hardware and see how much of a difference we're talking!
So to start your firmware upgrade, head out to the Equallogic Support site and download the new Firmware. Once downloaded, extract it. Should look similar to:
Log into the Group Manager. Here's what I'm working with at the moment:
Click on the "Group Configuration", then go to the "Advanced" tab, and click on the "Update firmware..." button:
Enter the administrative password for the group:
Browse to the extracted firmware location and select the file with a tgz extension:
The Firmware Update Manager will tell you the status of the member/s in the group and give you an action. In this case, the member is running an older version of firmware and there is and "Upgrade" action available.
Click on the "Upgrade" button and it will start a 3 step process, starting with the FTP transfer of the firmware, then having the member process the firmware update, and finally a restart of each controller:
From my experience, the reboot is ONLY of each controller and not at the same time. The inactive controller reboots, then it is changed to the active controller, then the newly inactive controller is rebooted.
There was a little noticeable lag during the reboot, nothing major. Certainly wouldn't do this during the middle of a busy or even moderately busy day. VMware reported roughly 2.25 seconds of latency during the process:
Finally, after the reboot of each controller. They're both reporting as v5.1.1-H1 firmware!
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