Connection Lost while upgrading PS firmware

Hi Joerg

Thanks for replying, i was upgrading the PS series from 8.1.0 to 8.1.15.  I am not able to connect using http:/groupip as well. Its been 2 hrs since its not connecting. I updated in the same process for other similar machines and it didnt gave this error while upgrading them.

That you lost connect is a expected behaviour especially if you only have one member.

You havent told us the FW version youre comming from so please take notice that support for HTTPS was removed because of security reasons. So for accessing the the GropMGR again use http://groupIP instead of httpS://groupIP

Regards
Joerg

Thanks Don for pitching in for help!

Few questions in our mind as of now - 

We have few critical dev VM's hosted in the underlying SAN and the upgrade is stuck in the middle? How should we proceed forward?

I dont even see a way to cancel the on-going process and are running out of way to connect to DSUM. Just worried if we will lose the connections to SAN storage. 

Thanks Don for pitching in for help!

Few questions in our mind as of now - 

We have few critical dev VM's hosted in the underlying SAN and the upgrade is stuck in the middle? How should we proceed forward?

I dont even see a way to cancel the on-going process and are running out of way to connect to DSUM.

Hello, 

 Can you access the Group CLI via SSH?   Can you ping the array?    Are you using dedicated management?   

If so make sure the management cable on the other controller is connected.  That being a common problem. 

 The upgrade isn't stuck in the middle, if you did the restart.  The process first restarts the secondary to upgrade it, and when that is successful and reconnects to the active, the active controller fails over to complete the process. 

 Since you got to the restart, the upgrade is complete. 

 So the array isn't down?  You VMs are still OK?   If so then we are dealing with a management / GUI issue. 

If you can't ping or connect to the management port IP address, then using the serial port is next option. 

 My best guess is the management port cable isn't there or that port not in same VLAN, etc... 

 Regards,

Don 

Hello, 

 Absolutely!  

  It's not going to get worse.  The array is up and running so the upgrade process completed.  It's just the out-of-band management.  Since this is remote, I would strongly suggest a terminal server.  They are not very expensive and would allow you direct access in case of problems like these. 

 Once this is corrected, are you planning on upgrading further?   8.x is older code, that's not maintained anymore. 

 Regards, 

Don 

Don,

Our VM's are ok and storage of the VM's is also accessible. Only thing is we are neither able to ping the ip nor able to connect to the SSH. Connection to group manager itself is failing.

Our Onsite resource is not available to check the cables and other connection things. We are expecting the resource will be available after 2 days. Will it be OK to postpone the activity for 2 days? 

Hi Don Thanks for the information it was very useful for us. Issue occurred because there was no management cable connected to the secondary controller and so we lost connection to the group manager when it failed over. We asked the onsite person to plug in the cable and it worked. There were no cables in eth0 and eth1 as well for the secondary controller and i wonder how it worked till we fixed without losing the connections to the volumes. And one more thing i want to ask is, for the current active controller eth1 is down and we are in process of fixing it. Prior to it i want to know why these eth0 and eth1 are exactly used for? Can we proceed for the further upgrades of ps series before fixing it. our plan is to upgrade till Version 10

Thanks

Dinesh Pathapati

Hello, 

 You are very welcome. 

 ETH0, ETH1 are the ports where iSCSI data goes to and from the switches.  So that's how your servers get to the SAN storage. Via those two ports.   Without both you can hinder performance and lose redundancy.  It is important that you resolve this issue soon.  You can upgrade with just one active iSCSI port. 

 Regards,

Don

Hi Don

I am planning to upgrade live SAN, Can we take any backup/snapshots and store it for safety. Currently we dont have replication or backups in place. Actually we don’t have much storage space, can we store backups anywhere in cloud. If so can you please let us know how to take it.

Hello, 

 Are you referring to the data on the SAN, or the SAN configuration metadata?   If you are talking about your actual data, there's no direct from SAN-to-Cloud backup option.   You can of course purchase storage cloud storage then via your hosts back up the data to the cloud. 

 There are hosting companies that will provide you with EqualLogic based replication storage partner so you can utilize the replication feature built into the array.  Depending on how much data you have and your Internet bandwidth that could take sometime to get the data copied.  After that it will only be the changes. 

 How much data is on the array?   It might be cheaper and faster to purchase 15TB external hard drives and backup your data to those.  Then going forward you have a way to backup your data. 

 Firmware updates by themselves don't pose a risk to your data.  The process used is the same as if you had a controller failure.  The update doesn't write to your data, it updates the code on the compact flash cards on each controller.  All your data and array configuration, logs, etc are stored on the array disks themselves.  Never on a controller. 

Regards, 

Don