Dell PowerStore Upgrade from 3.2.1 to 3.6 (Dark Site)
Last week I had the challenge of upgrading a Dark Site PowerStore from 3.2.1.0 to 3.6.0.0. PowerStore 3.6 brings a lot of new features, for me there are the following highlights:
- PowerStoreOS 3.6 introduces the highly anticipated Data-In-Place upgrades that allow users to upgrade their PowerStore appliance from a PowerStore x000T model to a PowerStore x200T model without downtime or host migration.
- FINALLY PowerStoreOS 3.6 now includes support for Metro Witness Server, allowing users to configure a fully active-active configuration for metro volumes across two PowerStore clusters – with more intelligent failure handling, resiliency and availability during an unplanned outage.
- Users now have the ability to use NVMe storage containers to support host access via the NVMe/TCP protocol for VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols).
Starting with the Upgrade BIN file, you will first need to login into your Dell Support account, whereupon you will need to enter the service tag of the PowerStore system. Then filter by operating system under Category.
A large list of operating system versions is available to you, here you select the appropriate one, in my case 3.6.0.0, A00
After the import into the dark site, I always like to perform a checksum check based on SHA256 and then the upgrade can begin.
We switch to our PowerStore Manager dashboard and click on Settings on the right-hand side.
Under Settings we go to Upgrades and see the general overview of software packages as well as previous upgrade activities.
As this is a dark site, Automatic download is deactivated. PowerStoreOS versions 3.0 and later allow you to automatically download software packages when support connectivity is enabled. This feature makes it easier to stay current with available software and eliminates the need to manually download packages. So we go the manual route and upload the upgrade package using Upload Package.
After the upload is done, we click on the 3.6 version and perform a health check, as support you should follow the information from the following link:
After the health check, we receive various warnings:
We don’t want to ignore the warnings (except SupportAssist Warning due to this is a Dark Site environment), so we jump to the CLI, login as Service and run a health check there too. This is a two-node cluster, so I run the health checks on both:
svc_health_check run
Both nodes have the status Passed, so there are no failures. After a little research, I found out that one of the customer’s co-workers had left an I/O meter running and that’s why the PowerStore was under load. So I started a second health check and the warning regarding the CPU load is still there but the Host IO Load warning is gone. I have written another blog article about this, as it may be a false positive messagess, you can find it here:
Once all errors and warnings have been eliminated or are in an acceptable state, the upgrade process can begin.
Messages while the Upgrade Process like these are normal:
After you click Reload the PowerStore Dashboard should be accessible and you can track the Upgrade progress.
Sources: https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/en-US/p/what-s-new-in-powerstoreos-3-6/
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/powerstore-3000t/pwrstr-upgrade/upgrading-powerstore-t-model-software?guid=guid-c52a1fce-6a33-43c3-be79-e30c4c7026f5
And that’s it from this blog post, if you have any questions please use the comment section below. 🙂