topic Re: disk firmware upgrade (pre-OnTap upgrade) in ONTAP Discussions

disk firmware upgrade (pre-OnTap upgrade)

danielmorgenstern — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:29:43 GMT

Hello All,

I'm planning an upgrade for our 3020cs to 7.3.1 and want to check my head.

In order to make sure that our disk firmwares are up-to-date and avoid possibility of reboot delay as disk firmwares update during the OnTap upgrade, I am planning get the disk firmware bundle with all the released disk firmwares and stage it onto the filers so that the background disk firmware updates take care of this ("options raid.background_disk_fw_update.enable on")

This should do the trick, correct? I didn't do this last time and had to wait during the change window...I'd like to avoid that if possible this time.

Also, it is my understanding that the backround disk updates are non-disruptive and transparent to users and mounted systems. Is that also correct?

I'm aiming for the nondisruptive upgrade. We have some SATA shelves so I know there is some amount of disruption for those shelves as the shelf firmware updates. I have seen documentation stating "up to 70 seconds" and that has been in line with my observations in the past. Has anybody seen otherwise for shelf firmware updates on SATA shelves?

Thanks in advance for info and opinions!

Regards,

Dan

Re: disk firmware upgrade (pre-OnTap upgrade)

pascalduk — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:52:35 GMT

danielmorgenstern wrote:

This should do the trick, correct? I didn't do this last time and had to wait during the change window...I'd like to avoid that if possible this time.

Also, it is my understanding that the backround disk updates are non-disruptive and transparent to users and mounted systems. Is that also correct?

Dan

The upgrade guide provides all your answers for disk:

http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel731/html/ontap/upgrade/upgrading/concept/c_oc_upg_svc_availability_disk_fw.html#c_oc_upg_svc_availability_disk_fw

Yes, if you have raid_dp or mirrored raid4, you can use the background updater (about 2-3 minutes per disk and only 1 at a time) and this will not affect availability.

For SATA you will definitely see the 70-75 seconds disruption. If you have A & B modules in a shelf, you will see the disruption twice! In ontap 7.3.x with a multipath HA configuration with version firmware 37 this has been fixed:

http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel731/html/ontap/upgrade/upgrading/concept/c_oc_upg_shelf_fw_availability.html#c_oc_upg_shelf_fw_availability

Re: disk firmware upgrade (pre-OnTap upgrade)

danielmorgenstern — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:20:32 GMT

Thanks for sharing that info, Pascal.

I'm looking forward to getting our SATA shelves onto rev 37 so we can have fully NDUs in the future.

Regards,

Dan

disk firmware upgrade (pre-OnTap upgrade)

jmmorrell — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:36:04 GMT

I recently upgraded disk firmware prior to upgrading Data ONTAP and once I started the upgrade it reset ALL iSCSI sessions causing ALL my servers to go offline. This was VERY disruptive to our environment.

I thought this was suppose to be non-disruptive? I contacted support and I'm waiting for a response. Any ideas?

Re: disk firmware upgrade (pre-OnTap upgrade)

shaunjurr — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:45:51 GMT

If you read what the original poster stated (which is also documented elsewhere), upgrades of SATA shelf firmware can take up to 70 seconds and is disruptive if you don't have the newest firmware and your shelves multi-pathed. You obviously did not read the precautions and your server disk time-outs are set too low to perform shelf firmware upgrades which disrupt I/O. Increase your disk/device timeouts on the server side and read the documents on firmware upgrades.