Upgrading SAN Fabric Infrastructure

[emswilson1977]

Hi

Hopefully you guys can offer some advice.

I'm currently looking to update the IOS on the switches that make up our SAN fabric. To give a little background info - we are running vsphere on blades. Each has 2 HBA - each connecting to a separate fabric. In total there are 8 paths to each disk.

We are using an active/active array, and the fixed path option in vsphere.

My question is regarding the best way to handle the upgrade. Should I disable the relevant paths in vsphere whilst upgrading the IOS or just let vsphere detect the switch 'failure' and let it choose another path? The plan is to upgrade one fabric at a time.

Incidently, I'm assuming the active path is indicated in vsphere as the one with (I/O) next to it?

I'm more from a networking background, so apologies if Ive left anything out.

Thanks in advance!

[rsingler]

Generally if you have the ability to take the path your working on offline it is better for the server/OS no matter if its a physical host running an OS or a VMware host. My recommendation would be to do just that when you're doing this upgrade. You will want to try and ensure that the VMs are at a low IO workload period of time when you take the paths offline. e.g. Don't do this while backups or virus scans are running. Hope this helps.