We assume that your EQLs have dual controllers right?  EQL use a Active and Standby controller and in an event of a controller failure the failover took around 10sec. To survive this event ou need a propper setup of your phys. Switch, Hosts and VMs. Just follow the installation and best practices. So... a firmware upgrade perform the same kind of failover. Starting a FW upgrade flashes the standby controller first and than request a "restart" which perform the failover. Than the "new" standby will be also flashed. All of our EQL + VMware setups survive the 10 sec (4 pings are missing) breakage. If you would like to vacate one member of a pool for maintenance you need something like this - Both of your members are in the same pool - You create a new one and "move one member" out of the existing pool into the new one. If there is enough space left all volumes will be migrated automaticly to the existing and last member in the pool - If the member is now in your maintenance pool you can perform the FW upgrade Its fully transparent and non interruptible for the Hosts/VMs. But takes a looooonnnnng time to finshed. If your members are in different pools already and assuming enough space - Use "move volume" to transfer a volume from one pool into another. You have to check if there is enough space left - Another method should be to enable SyncRep for all Volumes and perform a Switch over. If one member than holds all SyncAlternates you can pause the SyncRep and perform the FW Upgrade. In the first 7 month of this year we need to perform 3(4?) FW Upgrade of our 11 EQLs which runs currently on 7.0.6. The time consumming vacuate process was never an option for us. The FW comes with a PDF about how to perform the upgrade and contains some notes so please take a look into it. Regards, Joerg
I am new to Equallogic and need to upgrade the firmware on one SAN PS 6000 that is in a cluster with TWO SAN's, the firmware needs to go from v6.0.7 to v7.0.5 My questions: I have been told that I need to vacate the SAN (migrate everything off of it) to the second SAN in the cluster so there is no risk on anything going wrong to the VM's while the firmware upgrade happens. Where am I supposed to do this from? I have checked the SAN Equallogic Group manager interface and VMWare vsphere GUI and I do not see a place where I can do it. Any advice will be greatly appreciated. 
Upgrade firmware on ONE Equallogic SAN on a cluster