Hello Andy,   re: 1. Regardless of how you upgrade firmware, it will copy the firmware to both controllers.  Then restart the passive to make the upgrade effective.  Failover to bring that member up to new firmware level, and restart the now passive older revision controller, to bring it up as well.  Re:Q  You can do this to a production system.  Best to do it when IO is lower. This reduces the time it takes for the controllers to complete the failover process.    Re:2.  Yes MEM v1.2 or 1.3 will continue to work. So performance should not degrade.     Re: 3.  I would say the most common issue is write failure on the SD card.  Doesn't happen often.    Best piece of advice I can offer is configure and test serial port connections to your controllers.  If something should go wrong you will need that in order to triage it.  My personal preference has always been to upgrade firmware via the serial port vs. Group Manager or DSUM.   You get the most information possible via serial and if something does happen you are right there to see it, and capture any failure information.   BTW, you will need to upgrade to 8.1.x before you can upgrade to 9.1.x.  Updated version of 8.1.x and 9.1.x are due out very soon, worth waiting for the before upgrading   Before you upgrade or test failover, have you setup the VMware servers to EQLs best practices?  This Tech Report covers how to do that.  [URL] There are several timeout values that need to be extended to better handle restarts/failovers.  Also within the Guest VMs, there is also a timeout in the OS.   Windows can be especially sensitive.  With the firmware downloads on the EQL support site, there is a document on changing that timeout as well.   Regards, Don    
We have a nest of two PS6500 (10k and 7k2) which are in support and running our VMware clusters (2 clusters each of three R720s). The PS6500 firmware is currently 7.0.9 on both and as we are upgrading VMware to 6.5U1 I am assuming that to keep MEM compatibility we have to upgrade the firmware to v9.1.xx in steps as described on the support site, and install MEM 1.5. I have several questions: Q. I'm assuming that we can do this production system upgrade without having to shutdown any VMs? I can shutdown roughly half during our quiet period but other VMs are somewhat essential and I plan to keep them up. (Yes, we have backups!) 2. As we upgrade each VMware host, MEM v1.5 needs to get installed and configured on the host. Q. Other hosts will continue to work with 1.2 (or 1.3, I forget which) despite the firmware upgrade? If not then I assume the performance will be degraded during this VMware update period? 3. What can go wrong! Q. I'm assuming that a failover could fail if there was a Controller issue but is there any way to test this in advance? Can I failure over the controllers via the Group Manager to "pretest" the controllers? Finally I must say that after 5-years of use these PS6500s have just worked (knock on wood). ...Andy
Upgrading PS6500 from 7.0.9 to latest and VMware 6.5U1