Is it save yet to upgrade to FLARE OE .29

The CX4 Series FLARE Operating Environment Release Notes  4.29 A02 are available on powerlink at:

Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Hardware/Platforms Documentation > CLARiiON CX4 Series Systems > CLARiiON CX4-960 > Release Notes

Thanks. Strange but I could not find the release notes first. But I'v got it!

Do you have any tips about the first question?

I think that is because it takes a while for everyone to get to the target levels. Everyone has different change control and maintenance windows. My company only has one maintenance window a month and it is six hours long. Because that window is for all servers in a data center with 350 servers and five storage arrays, upgrading FLARE can fall to the bottom of the list. It is a challenge for me just to keep the host agents/drivers up to date.

WOW. Great document. It helps a lot. But there are only 9% of systems that running flare 4.29

hmm what to do, what do to?

@Roy: Are you not able to find FLARE release notes using this powerlink menu selection?

Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Hardware/Platforms Documentation > CLARiiON CX4 Series Systems > CLARiiON CX4-960 > Release Notes

There are two docs, one for the 28 brach and another for 29 branch.

About whether at all to move to FOE 29, is there a compelling reason presented to you from EMC or any that you discovered for this decision? Perhaps the Release notes' Fixed problems section will help you decide.

Cheers,

-joji

Sorry, redundant info!!

Cheers,

-joji

Oh, all those servers aren't SAN attached. There are only about 80 SAN attached servers. I just listed the datacenter count as we all have to share the same maintenance window.

I am taking my Cx4-480 to Rel 29 for that reason as well, the improvements to VMware integration make it worth it in addition to the updated features to VP. I have a Cx3-80 that is being upgraded to a Cx4-960 and that will be on rel 29 as well.

HI GUYS,

@AranH We have a small environment. 17 hosts and 2 Arrays. We also have one maintenance window per month for about 6 hours. But I have much flexibility.

I have to do it with our brand new CX4-240's

Are there any tips or thinks I need to know before I upgrade to the FLARE 29. Thinks that become handy and are not documented?

One thing you need to be careful of is if you use Ionix ControlCenter. Even with UB7 it still does not support FLARE 29. They are working on a patch now, but I still don't have a release date on that. I was considering upgrading to FLARE 29 with a CX4-480 to 960 upgrade, but now I'm holding off until ICC supports it.

Thanks for your reply on that. I feel lucky, becourse we don't use Ionix ControlCenter.

I really am not privy to any information outside the release notes regarding things to lookout for in the upgrade. The NDU upgrades are pretty straightforward and EMC has done a good job making this a process any enduser can perform.

*lol* I hope the ControlCenter Product Management team doesn't take that the wrong way!

Still doing some research before upgrade. And it came to my attension that there is still a major problem with the following:

71324001 SMBus read failed for device Local SPD DIMM1."

ID emc222703

Hmm should I upgrade or not?