While everyone was away for the holiday Monday, I took the opportunity to upgrade our SAN and ESX servers.  Everything went surprisingly well.

What was really impressive is how fast the Equallogic SAN reboots.  The firmware upgrade was the first reboot since it was installed.  They claimed you could reboot it “live” without causing any problems with the servers, but I had never tested that theory until now.  I was sending it a series of pings every 1 second during the entire process.  I dropped a total of 12 pings during the reboot and the servers never new the storage had just rebooted.  Pretty impressive!  Check this out (I did it from home, hence the 12-15ms latency):

I also migrated all of our ESX servers from version 3.0.2 to 3.5.  For some reason, the HA agent had to be reconfigured on a couple of them, and the ESX firewall decided to block outbound iSCSI traffic on every box after the upgrade.  Other than that, the ESX upgrades went great!

Out first diskless ESX server is no online also.  The QLogic HBA initially wouldn’t connect to our SAN using jumbo frames.  QLogic’s response was to send me their “Beta” or “Limited Release” firmware, which scares me a little.  I have several production VM’s running on that host with no issues though.  I hope to do some benchmarks on VMware Server vs ESX with software iSCSI vs ESX with hardware iSCSI.  Stay tuned for details on that!

I love it when a project goes as planned!