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

Failed Chunklets

In the 3 Par system rather than a whole disk being shown as failed you can just see individual chunklets that have done so.

I saw the following in the GUI, under System and Summary

I investigated further via the command line to see which physical disks contained the failed chunklets. I saw all 3 failed chunklets were on the same disk.

showpdch -fail

Once I had seen this I decided to proactively evacuate all the data from disk 28 so it can be removed.

servicemag start -pdid 28

Double check its running in the background

servicemag status

Interestingly I was told by the second HP engineer a disk is not considered failed until it has 6 failed chunklets. I would say the decision of when to proactively hotspare out a disk is down to personal discretion.

Richard Arnold2 Comments