Bcomer,

What is the firmware currently at on the MD3200, what are you trying to update to? What utility are you updating with?

Sorry for being so vague in the original post.  Here's a rundown of what's going on.

We have an MD3200 using SAS, supporting two R710's running VMware ESXi 4.1 via redundant connections from the controller cards.  The MD3200 is currently at firmware version 07.70.06.63.  I'm trying to update via the Module Disk Storage Manager, version 10.70.G6.27.

I'm attempting to upgrade first to 07.75.28.60 A06, and then from there I want to upgrade to 07.80.41.60 A07.  The controller module reporting the error has always given us some odd issues.  The SAS connection is working correctly, but the Ethernet management hasn't worked correctly for the past year.  The main problem is it was set to DHCP, but when I attempted to switch it to Static IP, it locked up and I've never been able to change the IP via MDSM.  Unfortunately our entire infrastructure runs from the MD3200, so it's not an easy machine to reboot to try to remedy the problem.

So from within MDSM, when I select the storage array and attempt to upgrade the firmware, I receive the error noted above.

I think the fix is easier; install the latest MDSM (~1.5GB ISO dated from 9/26/11), and then follow the instructions in the firmware download zipfile (the text file in there).

This thread seems to be quite old but I ran into the same problem when trying to upgrade the firmware.

The error might be related to the MDSM version, but it helped not to upgrade to the latest version. The fix that did it was specifying both IP addresses of both controllers for the SAN (MD3200i dual controller). After that, the spm database check disappeared. After that I had to clear the event log as well to get the update to work.