Pre Upgrade Clean Up – Stage 1 3 Par Cage Cabling

Before progressing to the next phase of the upgrade plan for 3.1.2 MU3 a couple of outstanding issues needed resolving. First of all HP had noticed the cabling of the disk shelves was incorrect, the bottom two shelves should have been connected via DP-1 but were using DP-2. No changes have been made to cabling so it must have been incorrect since installation.

We used the cabling guide for 2 node systems http://h20628.www2.hp.com/km-ext/kmcsdirect/emr_na-c03607590-4.pdf to check HP findings. The cabling setup is specific to the number of cages you have, the combination of large or small cages used and the number of nodes. We are using a 2 node system with 2 large cages and 5 small. The correct cabling is show in the diagram below:

In our case the two lowest cages on the red loop were connected via DP-2 and we managed to move them to DP-1 with no down time as service continued through the other loop. To check it was now running through the correct port I ran

Showcage –d

I then saw as below that link_speed was displayed correctly against DP1 rather than DP2.

 

————Cage detail info for cage7 ———

 

Position: —

 

Interface Board Info           Card0           Card1

     Firmware_status         Current         Current

         Product_Rev             320c             320c

State(self,partner)           OK,OK           OK,OK

VendorId,ProductId         HP,DCS1         HP,DCS1

         Master_CPU             Yes               No

           SAS_Addr 50050CC10EEEA83E 50050CC10EEFD63E

Link_Speed(DP1,DP2) 6.0Gbps,Unknown 6.0Gbps,6.0Gbps

 

PS PSState ACState DCState Fan State Fan0_Speed Fan1_Speed

ps0     OK     OK     OK       OK   HiSpeed   HiSpeed

ps1      OK     OK     OK       OK   HiSpeed   HiSpeed

 

I checked over my connected systems for any issues, plus ran a checkhalth and and showalert –n to check for any issues. All looked good 🙂

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HP 3Par Upgrade Part 1 – Planning

I have received notification that one of our 3Par systems requires an update to 3.1.2 MU3.  The following series of posts will detail how I went about the upgrade.

First thing was to read up on the documentation.  I read the following online from the HP support centre:

HP 3PAR Operating System Upgrade Pre-Planning Guide

HP 3PAR OS 3.1.3 Release Notes

HP 3PAR Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008 Implementation Guide

Plus the release notes for each of the patches

Plus I was also sent a couple of documents from HP in the release notification called

HP 3PAR OS Upgrade Preparation Guide

HP 3par OS 3.1.1 / 3.1.2 Upgrade Pre-planning Recommendations

Having read through these I have made some notes on the key points relating to our system:

Pre Upgrade SAN Checks:

  • showversionto verify the current InForm OS level on the array
  • checkupgradeto verify if the system is ready to undergo an ONLINE upgrade.
  • checkhealth -svc detailperforms a full HealthCheck on the system
  • Check CPU utilisation. statcpu -t -d 15 -iter 1 Must be less than 50%
  • Check port utilisation. statport -d 15 -iter 1 -ni – For each port, the average I/O, Kbytes per sec, needs to be less than 50%. The official documentation showed the following figures:

200,000 Kbytes per sec, for 4 Gb connections

400,000 Kbytes per sec, for 8 Gb connections ie less than 50%

Pre Upgrade Host Checks

  • Check MPIO set to round robin. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee619752%28WS.10%29.aspx. Defaults to active passive
  • LUN’s marked as offline following reboot, this is seen on MS clustered LUN’s that are not configured as shared LUN’s or standalone servers. KB2849097 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2849097  gives a script that can prevent this. The recommendation is that this applied to all hosts connected to the 3 Par regardless. Needs to be run on each host prior to upgrade.  Execution policy must be changed to RemoteSigned to allow.

We will also be installing patches 18,25,30,35 as part of the upgrade the key features of each are:

3.1.2 P18 – Drive Support

3.1.2 P30 – P30 has fixes and improvements for ODX (Windows), Port 8Gbs timing with certain SFPs

3.1.2 P35 – Drive Support

3.1.2 P25 – Is very important for 3 and 4 TB drives, it changes the initial test run that can result in a critical issue with the drives

 

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Richard Arnold3 Comments