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msidnamFlag for United States of America

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Update Dell 740XD FW for SAS,iDRAC, network, etc in vCenter cluster

Hello Everyone. We currently have 10 Dell 740XD servers in a vCenter cluster. 3 of those servers were just added a week ago and have all firmware, bios, SAS, network, iDRAC, etc all updated. The other 7 have been in production for a few years and the only updates we have done recently is the iDRAC (although it is now behind as well).


I am always very cautious when doing these firmware updates just in case the ESXi host/vCenter has issues with it. Since the 3 new servers are working I would suspect it should be fine, however I wanted to double check to see if there is anything i should be aware of. The three new servers, while part of the vSAN, do not have their disks claimed yet. Not sure if that makes a difference.


I was going to update one of the older servers over the weekend, let it sit for a day or two to make sure the updates were fine. Hoping that even if it is fine, its not causing some issue in the background that we dont see for a while.


Thank you. 

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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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I believe they should be fine. I have only ever had a firmware issue cause a problem and that was years ago with a Cisco blade center. Unfortunately, it still did not show up for several weeks and it ended up being a bug in the Cisco code that was causing the vCenter issue, not VMware integration itself.
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ASKER

Thank you both for the info. I'm old school, and I know we need to keep everything updated as quickly as possible, but I remember the old days when sometimes updates caused more grief than what they were supposed to fix (like the issue with Cisco Rodney mentioned).

My plan was to do like Andrew suggested, do one a week (as long as the servers being on different firmware versions is ok). If I did two servers over a week or two with no issues, then I would feel pretty confident that I could take a weekend and do the rest.
VSAN can be tricker with updates and HBA for Fibre Channel
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our vSAN is using Perc 740p on the Dell servers and they are connected to 10GbE NICs and switch. should I take extra care with this config? The 740p are in pass through mode.
yes, because firmware can affect vSAN stability. e.g. storage controller and network interface firmware. Because there is a rule "if it works....."

and are these vSAN Ready Nodes, or just Dell R740XD because the two are different.
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Just Dell 740XD. not vSAN ready nodes.
Yes, same applies, just check and confirm as yours VMs are dependant on vSAN is completely dependant upon HBA and NICs !

These three new servers should have been firmware updated before installation, but as they are not running vSAN at present pose little risk, but do check firmware's against vSAN HCL.

If you update a ESXi host, the vSAN Health check does verify hardware against the online HCL.
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The three new servers had all their firmware updated before being added to the cluster and vSAN. I have not claimed disks on those servers. their HDDs have not been added to storage yet.

I wasn't sure if that would pose an issue with the 7 servers so I was thinking I should probably update them as soon as I can.
it should be easy to validate them against skyline then.
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As I was doing some looking at Skyline health and googling, I think I also need to make sure the drivers for HBA and NICs are also update if updating the firmware?
correct that's based on ESXi build version, which should all be the same in the cluster, if possible.

Which is why we do ESXi build updates and firmware updates at the same time.
However, I have seen instances where the latest certified driver and what is in the build is different, so you do need to check the HCL as Andrew mentioned. I had a storage support issue one time and the version of the fnic drivers were not the most recent. Therefore, support made me upgrade them first and make sure the same issue was occurring after the enic and fnic firmware version was on the recommended level. Since then, I always double check the versions.