Upgrading unified VNX freezes; leaves Unisphere broken

Last week I was upgrading a VNX5300 unified to FLARE 32, since FLARE 31 will be end of support soon, and ran into some issues. This is the first time I had ever had this happen to me, but apparently it’s a know issue.

When running the upgrade from Unisphere Service Manager, all of the prep work goes fine and you can start the upgrade. However about 10-15 minutes into the upgrade you will notice that the progress bar starts progressing. Another sign that you have run into this known bug is to SSH into the primary control station and issue a /nas/sbin/getreason – You will see that the secondary control station is powered off, and you will also have noticed a “This system is being upgraded…. get out” type warning when you logged in.

I gave the system about 3 hours (I was off doing other things) before I called support. The fix isnt pretty, but it does work.

What you will need to do is get the upgrade DVD from support.emc.com and put it into the primary control station.

Next login to CS0 as root

Then run the following:

mount -r /media/cdrom

mount /dev/hdc /celerra/upgrade

cd /celerra/upgrade/EMC/nas

./install_mgr -m upgrade
This will kick the NAS portion of the upgrade off using the CD as the source for the update. After it has completed Unisphere will be back online and you can proceed to upgrade the block side of the array with USM again without issue.

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7 Responses to "Upgrading unified VNX freezes; leaves Unisphere broken"

  1. I’ve done probably 100 upgrades and this is honestly the first one that has ever broken… In a way I’m glad it did, gives me an excuse to get into the CLI and poke around. This bug only affects Unisphere really… so NAS and Block services stay online, you just cant access Unisphere till you fix it.

  2. Thank you! I just had the same issue when updating to version 7.1.76-4. The USM said “Restarting control station” and that’s it – no more activity. Thanks to your post i could finish the update without calling support. Greetings

  3. Hi, I have a VNX5300 that I had to reimage. However, it was left without the licenses (flare) and also in an old version. Justin Paul, can you get me the FLARE 32 block VNX5300?

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