Automation is a great thing and can save you a lot of time if used correctly. Some times a manual approach is preferred tho, and that’s probably the reason why you are viewing this article. The instruction described in this article will enable you to upgrade your HP StoreVirtual nodes one-by-one instead of by Management Group.

It’s been a while since I’ve been managing HP StoreVirtual nodes on a daily basis and got back in touch with it because of a colleague asking me about the upgrading procedure. The last time I upgraded the environment he was talking about, I came across the fact that the acceptation and the production environment were both managed by the same Management Group. They had their own cluster (dedicated storage nodes) and LUNs, but when upgrades needed to be done, it had to be done by Management Group.

This means both acceptation and production would be upgraded in a single run. Usually you would like to upgrade your test-acceptation-production environments in specific order, leaving some time between them to make sure you’re not introducing any issues in production.

The automated process which is provided by the CMC (Centralized Management Console) works really well! But in terms of the described order of deployment, a big-bang approach is not really desirable. To prevent running into the same situation, be sure to create seperate Management Groups if you don’t want to upgrade all entities inside the Management Group in a single run.

By enabling the “Support Mode” of the CMC, you are able to upgrade specific storage nodes instead of the whole Management Group. Follow the instructions below to enable this support mode. Use this mode on your own risk!

Important note: Support Mode upgrades does not protect the availability of your LUNs in contrast to the default upgrade mode. Be sure to keep enough storage nodes online to retain quorum and prevent impact.

1. Close the CMC
2. Navigate to the preferences.txt file.
3. a. Linux: /home//.storage/preferences.txt
   b. Windows 2003: c:\documents and settings\username\.storage_system\preferences.txt
   c. Windows 2008: c:\users\username\.storage_system\preferences.txt
4. Open the preferences.txt file in an editor (notepad)
5. Add the following lines to the end of the file
   CmcSystemPreference.supportMode=true
   CmcUpgradePreference.useOldUpgrades=true
   CmcUpgradePreference.userUpgrade=true
6. Save the file
7. Launch the CMC
8. Go to the Configuration Summary item in the navigation pane
9. In the right pane, go to the NEW “Support Upgrades” tab
   Note: CMC version 10.x and later the cmc background will be yellow when support mode is set.
10. Click Browse, go to program files(x86)\hp\p4000\ui\downloads or the location of the p4000 downloads files. Note: Customer may have stored the download files to another directory or share.
11. Change “files of type:” to all files
12. Select the desired .patch or .upgrade file, select open
13. Select the storage node from the list of available nodes
14. Click the Install button, which will become available once a patch and node are selected
15. Once the patch/upgrade is installed, Exit the CMC
16. (This will remove lines added in step 4 and remove the support upgrades tab from the cmc)
17. Launch the CMC