Oliver: Are you saying that if I had specified the drive - I would not have had to failover ?

I tried it two days ago with 6.0.1 on an 840 that belongs to a cluster. The initial insertion of the new drive caused it's own disk_fw_update to occur on the filer that the drive belonged to. The partner however complained at me the rest of the day. I tried to "update" without any precautionary steps and the partner asked me if the owner was at the ok prompt or not - so I spoke with Reena at NetApp tech support. As per her advise - I failed over and did the update then gave back. It seems excessive to me that the partner felt the need to fw_update a disk that was already updated. Seems that it would be a simpler task to make him realize the news. - granted this was my first encounter with the dreaded "Spare Drive" replacement causing such havoc - but I will do my bit in the future to be sure that NetApp knows the model and serial number of the drives I want to replace.

tw

"Krause, Oliver" OKrause@netapp.com@mathworks.com on 01/08/2001 03:50:31 PM

Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com

To: "'Tom "Mad Dog" Yergeau'" MadDog@fool.com, "'toasters@mathworks.com'" toasters@mathworks.com cc: Subject: RE: disk_fw_update issue with 840-5.3.7R2

As i said you can upgrade a single disk with "disk_fw_update <disk>" without service disruption while this disk is a spare. Again, you have to specify the disk. Also does a disk firmware upgrade not take 2 minutes per disk if you use disk_fw_update.

Oliver

BTW: ONTAP 6.0 and higher is supposed to do a automatic update when you insert a disk with older firmware (have not tried it yet). Cool, isn't it?

-----Original Message----- From: Tom "Mad Dog" Yergeau [mailto:MadDog@fool.com] Sent: Montag, 8. Januar 2001 17:39 To: 'Krause, Oliver'; 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: RE: disk_fw_update issue with 840-5.3.7R2

Just upgrading one disk still takes downtime for the whole system. The filer may be up, but if I can't access my data, effectively, it's down.

"Downloading disk firmware can be disruptive to the system. It involves spinning down and then spinning up all affected disks, and suspending all disk I/O to all disks while that is happening. This may take up to 2 minutes to complete. This delay may cause clients to hang, and may cause CIFS clients to drop sessions."

It should be noted that this notice can be misleading. It actually takes up to two minutes PER TYPE OF DISK to complete a disk_fw_update. So if you have two models of 18 GB drives and two models of 36 GB drives, if can take up to eight minutes to flash the firmware. Been there, done that. Was a little surprised the first time. :)

Since replacement disks often ship with firmware different than the level currently being used on a filer, it would be nice if (a) NetApp checked autosupport logs and pre-flashed the firmware for you before sending you the disk (b) You could flash a single disk w/o disrupting all I/O for the entire filer. Especially if the disk is marked as a spare and therefore not part of any volume.

If NetApp wanted to get *really* ambitious (I dunno, for ONTAP 6.5 or something), this would be wild: flash firmware on a volume one disk at a time, and keep the volume online. While each disk is being flashed, use the parity disk to serve data, and keep track of writes somewhere to get the flashed disk back up to synch when the flash is done.

It's too bad NetApp doesn't offer mirroring, since if you had mirrored sets this would be a real piece of cake. Just flash half a mirror while the other half served data.

Online disk_fw_update would be a big help in five 9s environments.

MD

-----Original Message----- From: Krause, Oliver [mailto:OKrause@netapp.com] Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2001 5:56 AM To: 'Premanshu Jain'; 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: RE: disk_fw_update issue with 840-5.3.7R2

You can specify which disk to upgrade. Try

disk_fw_update <diskname>

This works while the system is running.

Oliver

...

-----Original Message----- From: Premanshu Jain [mailto:PrJain@shastanets.com] Sent: Freitag, 5. Januar 2001 23:31 To: 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: disk_fw_update issue with 840-5.3.7R2

I have a 840 cluster. Whenever I add new disks, the cluster starts throwing 'doenrev disk firmware' error messages. NetApps suggests doing a disk_fw_update on the disk and strictly says "NO need to Halt a filer'. Reality is totally different. The command specifically asks you wether the cluster partner is on Halt-OK prompt or not?

The workaround I am doing, intitiate a takeover and do the disk_fw_update. However, this still needs to do a takeover/giveback and 2 minutes of downtime...Adding/replacing bad disks is a regular activity...

Any suggestions..?