SAN/iQ 9.0 How to Disable (Circumvent) Automatic Upgrade Path

CAUTION - this is not a recommended path as the SAN/iQ 9.0 software is designed with the intelligence to painlessly automatically upgrade an entire SAN/iQ 9.0 SAN Management Group. If you use this to upgrade your NSMs one at a time, remember the order of FOM (Fail Over Manager), non-manager, manager not holding the VIP (Virtual IP,) and finally VIP holder, also remote management group first, and be sure to check the official HP documentation.


Procedure

1: On the workstation/server where the HP P4000 Centralized Management Console (CMC) is installed, make sure the CMC is closed and open up the CMC's preferences.txt file

On pre Windows Vista/Server 2008 Systems, the location is something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\.storage_system

On Windows Vista/Server 2008 and above, it is:

C:\Users\{username}\.storage_system

2: Edit the preferences.txt file with this line at the bottom

CmcUpgradePreference.useOldUpgrades=true

and save the file but do not close it

3: Open up the CMC and log in, and under the configuration summary there will be a tab called “Support Upgrades”, from here the NSMs can be patched one at a time!


Default location of upgrade files downloaded via the upgrade tab is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\HP\P4000\UI\downloads

- or (32-bit Windows systems) -

C:\Program Files\HP\P4000\UI\downloads


Scenarios as to why this might be used

1: Personal preference (not really a good reason since the software has been designed by clever people and in them one must trust)

2: A Management Group has two or more clusters in, and control is required over which cluster is done first

3: There is no hot replica (DR) site or off SAN disk based backups, so in the event of having to undergo a thorough change request procedure which demands a minimal downtime in the extremely unlikely event of SAN failure, it is desired to do the upgrade one node at a time (since a SAN/iQ cluster can happily survive without a whole NSM until it is recovered for network RAID resilient volumes)


A recommendation before doing the upgrade

Keep a note of all Feature Keys and License Keys before the upgrade process, in the event they are required to rebuild an NSM.


Credits: The procedure was provided by an HP Storage guru based in North America (not sure I am at liberty to provide names here :-) )

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