Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Dell EqualLogic Firmware 4.2.1

I made the jump to the new EqualLogic/Dell firmware this past Monday to 4.2.1. I was previously on 3.3.3. The upgrade path I chose was first applying the 3.3.3 L2 patch then firmware releases 4.0.7 > 4.1.5 > 4.2.1 all from the CLI. The upgrade went smoothly without any problems - YAY! A reboot was required on each release. The 3.3.3 L2 patch did not require a reboot.

According to Dell -
The EqualLogic PS Series Firmware Version V4.2.1 is supported on all storage array platforms. This release is a new feature release of the 4.2 version of the software and adds the following new features:
• Preemptive drive replacement
• RAID reconstruction performance improvements
• Improved support for solid-state drives (SSDs)
• Support for 16-member groups

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Chris... how long did it take? Were the reboots long? I read that the reboots alter some database tables and take ages...

Chris said...

@Andrew -
It took about an hour or so total.

The reboots were not long at all. I had read in some other posts as well about the length of time but luckily I didn't experience any of those issues.