I may be wrong, but here's the scenario I envision when you're talking about this:
a) Disk Fails b) RMA c) New disk arrives, with old firmware. d) Disk added as HotSpare - DOWNREV DISKS PRESENT! error abounds.
At this point, the new drive is a hotspare. If it's the only downrev disk, you could safely do a disk_fw_update, and it would take just the hotspare offline and upgrade it. I would be on the safe side and specify the disk to upgrade, but all in all, the Filer is still alive and serving data.
The key phrase below is "It involves spinning down and then spinning up all AFFECTED disks".
-john
John Witham MCSE, MCP+i, A+ Senior Systems Engineer Takeda Pharmaceuticals America, Inc. V://847.383.3304 F://847.383.3205 mailto://jwitham@takedapharm.com
-----Original Message----- From: Tom "Mad Dog" Yergeau [mailto:MadDog@fool.com] Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 10:39 AM 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
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Witham, John