Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
4 Posts
0
13438
Updating firmware on multiple servers using vCenter plugin
Hello,
I'm working with a customer now on a procedure for updating the firmware on multiple servers using the vCenter plugin. Customer has many full chassis of Dell blade servers (11th gen).
In the vCenter Plugin user guide, there is a step-by-step process for updating the bios/firmware on a single host. I need to know the process for updating the entire chassis at one time. (Not realistic to tell customer they have to update the firmware on every single server individually).
Any insight would be helpful!
Thanks.
Shawn Cannon
92 Posts
0
October 3rd, 2012 16:00
Considering a BIOS/firmware update requires a reboot, it would not make sense to update all of them at once as I assume these are ESXi servers and bringing them all down at once would be bad! I have not done a firmware update using the vCenter Plugin but I am more than willing to check it out and see if you can schedule upgrading multiple servers in a similar fashion to remediation with Update Manager. That way you can schedule them all but only one server at a time would actually go into maintenance mode and reboot. May not be possible but I am willing to check it out.
anthony_ferguso
4 Posts
0
October 9th, 2012 08:00
Hi, thanks for getting back to me! It's great to have the tech center as a resource to leverage for questions like this. Much appreciated.
Regarding the required reboots, there are many instances where I could see a customer doing this exact thing. For instance, a customer can schedule outages ahead of time and want to update an entire chassis at once on, say, a Sunday morning -- as opposed to updating 3 chassis with 16 blades in each chassis, individually. This type of maintenance window is pretty common -- many computing resources are most heavily used during the average work day, and users can expect planned outages on the weekend.
Also, another specific example from this case speaks to their setup: they have a hot data center with redundant hardware that can support 100% of the workload shift.. They can bounce VM's to their other DC, and take all the chassis in one datacenter offline for maintenance (or network, or power maintenance -- as needed). In this case, they are 100% ESX, and if the servers are in a maintenance window, it makes sense for their workflow to simply issue the updates for all systems at once. The customer would prefer not to use yet another console (such as OME) to do this, as they have the plugin.
Thanks for your time!
Shawn Cannon
92 Posts
0
October 9th, 2012 09:00
OK I looked into this and you are correct in that you can only do firmware updates per server at this time. I will recommend a feature update to Dell that would allow you to remediate all servers with missing firmware updates at once and even have the option to schedule. As a workaround I know you can currently do this for blade servers directly in the blade management chassis interface, but since it does not integrate with vCenter, it would not put a host into maintenance mode first. So the bottom line is: a global server firmware update option is needed so that servers can be remediated at once which would basically update one server at a time using the remediation features in vCenter.
Let me know if I am incorrect with that statement. I want to make the proper recommendation to Dell. FYI, vCenter server 5.1 support is coming with the current vSphere client but support for the new web vSphere client is coming next year, no ETA yet (per Dell).
anthony_ferguso
4 Posts
0
October 15th, 2012 12:00
Yes, that is correct. Thank you.