I would like to share some of my personal best-practices in upgrading firmwares on Brocade SAN switches and/or directors. This blog post is divided in several sections:
- Pre-upgrade tasks;
- Upgrading the SAN switch;
- Post-upgrade tasks;
- Alternative FTP server;
- Putty log of a SAN switch upgrade.
First of all, it’s important to mention every Brocade SAN switch has two firmware partitions. The Fabric OS (also referred to as “FOS“) is booted from the active partition, whereas the secondary partition is used to provide the ability to perform a non-disruptive firmware upgrade or as a fallback mechanism in case the firmware on the primary partition is damaged.
SANSWITCH:admin> firmwareshow
Appl Primary/Secondary Versions
FOS v7.0.0c
FOS v7.0.0c
The firmware on the SAN switch can be upgraded disruptively or, non-disruptively which will take some more time. When you are upgrading SAN switch components in a live production environment, it’s highly advisable to use the non-disruptive approach.
The firmware upgrade path can be collected from the “Brocade Fabric OS vA.B.CD Release Notes“. In general, we can say non-disruptive upgrade is supported from the previous version (identified as “B” in the version information). For example: v7.1.2b > v7.2.1c > v7.3.1d > v7.4.1. Continue reading →