2015 07 27 18 17 53

HP Virtual Connect – Upgrade from version 3.30 to 4.41

HP, Networking, , , , , , , , , , ,

Hi,

Only a quick post, but after my last bashing of HP virtual connect. I’ve had to endevour another upgrade for a different customer. This time with two HP chassis that are connected together.

For this customer they are on version 3.30 and need to upgrade to the latest version 4.41.

After speaking with HP support, the suggested upgrade path is;

3.60 / 3.70 / 4.10 / 4.20 / 4.31 / 4.41

For me the each firmware took around 35 to 45 minutes to complete. And you need “Virtual Connect Support Utility 1.11.0” to upgrade to 4.31 and above.

Note: that if you use the vcsu.exe tool and have mutliple flex-10 modules connected together in a domain, the firmware will update all the modules at once, you cannot upgrade just 2 modules of 4, for example.

How to update the Virtual Connect Manager

Note: Please plan downtime for this, as in my case it took everything offline whilst updating both modules.

So to update the Virtual Connect Manager, leave the web interface, as you don’t do it there, you need to download the “Virtual Connect Support Utility”, you can find the latest version here.

To do this, you open up the command interface,

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As you can see this launches a command prompt in the install area of the utility.

1. Type vcsu.exe and enter

2. Type update and enter

3. Enter the IP address of the Onboard Administrator, username and password.

4. Drag your firmware file from its location into the CMD prompt window and this will automatically out the file location in for you.

4. Click through the options until it says “Initializing, please wait… [Step 1 of 2]”

5. When prompted it will tell you its discovered the Virtual Connect domain, enter the username and password for the Virtual Connect Manager

6. Enter yes after confirming the version you are on and version you are going to.

7. Once done it will tell you its completed and where the log files are loaded.

Here is a full screenshot of the process, with the steps highlighted in yellow with green marks for easy identification.

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Things to know about the Virtual Connect Support Utility

it saves everything in your temp location, so where it tells you it’s saved the log, copy the location and open it up

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So it doesn’t just output a file which is the copy of your update session, which in this case is called “vcsu-15044.log”

It saves a copy of your Virtual Connect Manager settings before the upgrade, of which mine was called “vcConfig-8895406-BLE01_vc_domain-201408130822”

And finally there is the Support Info output which can be used by HP support to determine the status of your hardware before and after the firmware update “vcSupportInfo-8895406-BLE01_vc_domain-201408130823”

If you run the “collect” command, then it produces an output to the temp location for the following files

– Session output

– ShowAll of OA

– ShowAll of Virtual Connect Manager

2014-08-13_10-08-11
Regards

Dean

read

And more blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing

General, Storage, VMware, , , , , , , , , , ,

A little bit of a longer one than usual, as I was part way through writing this the other month, then I got distracted with other blog posts.

Hope you find some of these useful.

Documentation

EtherealMinds Eleven Rules of Design Documentation – This is one the best articles I’ve read in a long time, and reiterates the fact you need to keep it simple and a diagram replaces a thousand words.

Microsoft Continue reading And more blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing →

logo veeam on forum uk 2015

Last Minute VeeamON:Forum London plug!!!

General, , ,

Oops I forgot to post this last week as I was busy finishing off my Cisco UCS Blog posts, but still if you read this in time, maybe you’re in the area and can nip down, or pull a sickie and get in, the event will be worth it!!

Personally I was all booked up for a trip down to the capital from the sunny north of England, however due to unforeseen circumstances, I cannot make it. Which is a shame, as I’ve been speaking to a few vendors that will be there, and it sounds as this will be a properly organised event, and not something thrown together.

So head on down and enjoy it for me!!!!

VeeamON_Forum_UK_logo

VeeamON Forum, in June -http://go.veeam.com/veeamon-forum-uk
Europe’s Premier Data Center Availability Event. The one and only event that’s entirely focused on solving your challenges in providing Availability for the Modern Data Center™

When: 6/11/2015

Where: The Science Museum. Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD

Main topics:

  • Externalizing your backups with Microsoft Azure and Veeam

Speaker: Ric Howe, Partner Technology Strategist, Microsoft

  • Tuning your v8: Top 10 Misconfigurations

        Speakers: Phillip Moore, Russell Nolan

  • Recovery – how storage snapshots complement a Backup & DR strategy

Speaker: Phil Davies, Senior Systems Engineer UK&I at Nimble Storage

  • Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practices 2015

Speakers: Chris Dearden, Preben Berg

EXCLUSIVE Veeam product presentation about NEW Veeam products coming in 2015

  • The event is entirely focused on solving challenges in providing availability of ALL applications and data.
  • Meet key Veeam® people and the world’s leading IT experts and visionaries to ask questions, share experiences and learn new ways to succeed!

Contests: LAB WARZ – Veeam’s first tech Contest, to be brought to Europe due to popular demand from VeeamON 2014 in Las Vegas. This action-packed competition will bring together IT pros, engineers and Veeam enthusiasts from Europe to tackle a Veeam-scenario obstacle course. Every participant will get a number of real cases in which he would have to solve the problem in limited period of time. The person who gets more points for solving cases – wins! Grand prize – Microsoft Surface Pro 3, second place prize – Apple Watch Green, 3rd Place Prize – Go Pro Hero 4.

Among event sponsors are Nimble, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, NetApp, Tintri – they are preparing their own speakers and contests.

And every participant of the event can win grand prize – trip to Formula 1 in Monaco! (Presumably in 2016)

Regards

Dean

2015 04 20 22 05 11

Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 4 – Upgrading the Firmware

Cisco, VMware, , , , , , , , , ,

My previous posts in the series covered getting the Cisco UCS up and running and into production, and it seems that adding how to upgrade the Firmware on the UCS at the end of the series is best, as you will find yourself needing to do this once the system is in production as well.

Note: Many thanks to Rene again for this simple post helping me through the steps.

Note2: It’s also worth looking through this short article on the do’s and don’t of UCS Firmware updates, from a session held at Cisco Live 2014.

Covered in this post;

  • Pre-reqs
  • Getting the Firmware
  • Upload firmware into UCS Manager
  • Upgrading UCS Manager
  • Upgrading the Fabric Interconnects
  • Upgrading the Blade Servers
Pre-Reqs

Continue reading Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 4 – Upgrading the Firmware →

2015 04 20 22 05 11

Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 3 – from scratch for VMware ESXi

Cisco, VMware, , , , , , , ,

This is the final part of the series, where I cover off installing ESXi 6.0 onto the blade of the UCS system.

  • Setting up the SD Cards (FlexFlash)
  • Installing ESXi via KVM

Note: Please check your firmware is at the correct level needed. You can see this guide for upgrade the firmware.

Setting up the SD Cards (FlexFlash) Continue reading Deploy a Cisco UCS system – Part 3 – from scratch for VMware ESXi →