Upgrading Brocade firmware on switches (not directors)
A post after a long gap, why??? Coz for a short while I worked as a consultant, and this meant I work on economics rather than technical stuff. Now that I'm back with some real technical workm you should be able to see more good stuff.
My posts on NetApps, Symantec/Veritas products and SAN troubleshooting have got good response. Thanks to readers.
So back to topic... Upgrading Brocade firmware on switches..!
I was surprised that there was'nt a simple howto on this. So here we go.
Note : My approach is to download the firmware and use it before I commit. This allows me to revert back to my old firmware if need be.
View FOS guide pg 165 for understanding the preparation for this acitivity. Steps like saving configuration, downloading new firmware, configuring FTP server etc. has been described here.
The internal process will be as follows
1. firmware -s download command is entered, and you respond to prompts.
2. Firmware is downloaded to Secondary Partition
3. Primary and Secondary boot pointers are swapped
4. CP boots from firmware in new Primary partition.
After a few days of cool operation, run the firmwareCommit command and then the new firmware is copied to the seconday partition as well.
Thats it we'll see a snapshot.
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switch:admin> firmwareDownload -s
Type of Firmware (FOS, SAS, or any application) [FOS]:
Server Name or IP Address: 192.168.32.10
Network Protocol (1-auto-select, 2-FTP, 3-SCP) [1]:
User Name: userfooFile Name: /home/userfoo/v5.3.0
Password:
*Do Auto-Commit after Reboot [Y]: n
*Reboot system after download [N]: y
Firmware is being downloaded to the switch. This step may take up to 30minutes.
Checking system settings for firmwaredownload...
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*Recommended steps. Say no to autocommit and yes to reboot after download.
Incase things dont turn out to be nice, and you get some nasty emails complaining loss of path, new storage not visible etc. Then its time to roll back.
To restore from the secondary partition, if you have not run the firmwarecommit command, this is what you run
firmwareRestore
Simple, aint it...! Atleast I would say so..! The pain is co-ordination with system admins and busniess owners, we dont have commands for these operations :)
