I’ve previously wrote a howto to upgrade your Isilon cluster’s firmware. The process hasn’t changed much over time: you upload a node firmware package to the cluster, install it, and then apply it to the nodes themselves. Time wise though, it’s not a quick process. Each node will reboot during this process, and the process takes at least 10 minutes per cycle. Imagine a 100+ node cluster and running this process one node at a time…
Fortunately, OneFS 8.2 has recently introduced a nice new tool to make this node firmware upgrade a bit easier and much faster: isi_upgrade_helper. It figures out which nodes can upgrade simultaneously and spits out the relevant commands for you.
We’re in the midst of a VCE vBlock 340 software upgrade. Part of this upgrade process is upgrading the Cisco Nexus 5K switches that connect the blades and storage to the customer network. After upgrading the switch we suddenly noticed on the switch that the VNX Unified standby data mover (server_3) interface suspended with a “no LACP PDUs” error message. A quick check on the switch that wasn’t upgraded yet showed that interface to be online. So what’s up with that?
A VNX Unified upgrade is fairly easy: Unisphere Service Manager (USM) does most of the heavy lifting. A Block only system is the simplest of all: you upload a .ndu software package to the system and wait for the update to complete.
A Brocade firmware upgrade once in a while is highly recommended: new releases usually squash bugs and add new features, which helps with a stable and efficient SAN infrastructure. The upgrade process itself is relatively straightforward if you keep in mind that you can only non-disruptively upgrade one major release at a time. With that knowledge you only need a FTP server (like Filezilla), SSH client (PuTTY), the upgrade packages and some patience.
Isilon scale-out NAS clusters (or grids) are built out of nodes or servers using (relatively) cheap commodity hardware. Compared to a traditional storage system this has the advantage that with every capacity (=disks) expansion you’re adding to the cluster, the number of CPUs, amount of RAM and network ports grows accordingly. You just add another node or server and poof: more TBs, more speed. The proprietary software OneFS then glues all those nodes together to create one single immense filesystem (up to 20PB with current drive specs). But what’s one trait of commodity hardware? You occasionally need an Isilon firmware upgrade! The LSI disk controller needs a new release once in a while, as do perhaps the front panel or the Infiniband components. This howto explains what to do to make sure you’re running the latest firmwares!