Upgrading The Firmware; Important Notes; 12Big Rack Storage Server X86 Upgrade Procedure; Upgrade Files - LaCie 12big Rack Storage Server User Manual

LaCie 12big Rack Storage Server
User Manual

10. Upgrading the Firmware

10.1. Important Notes

Upgrading the firmware consists of two steps, to be performed in
this order:
✦ Upgrading the x86 subsystem.
✦ Upgrading the GEM subsystem.
NOTE: It is important to note that the x86 subsystem upgrade pro-
cess outlined in this chapter will not work unless the x86 subsystem
firmware has first been upgraded using the update CD in the GEM
USM 1.0 (i.e. BR2) package. This is because the system will not have
HPM upgrade capability prior to application of the USM 1.0/BR2
x86 motherboard update.
NOTE: Upgrades must be performed from the previous GEM USM
release package. If an upgrade is required from an earlier GEM
package, please contact your FAE who will provide you an assess-
ment of whether a direct transition can be made, or whether inter-
mediate upgrades will also be required.
10.2. 12big Rack Storage Server x86
Upgrade Procedure
NOTE: It is assumed that the native OS running on the 12big Stor-
age Server is a Linux variant. If an alternative OS is used, such as a
variant of MS Windows, a port of the optimized version of IPMITool
described in section

10.2.2. Optimized IPMITool

stage Xyratex is unable to provide ports for alternative OSs.
NOTE: To improve IPMI performance during the upgrade, it is rec-
ommended that all user IPMI daemons are suspended.
This procedure will upgrade the BIOS / FPGA and BMC firmware.
1. Acquire the optimized version of IPMITool indicated by section
10.2.2. Optimized IPMITool.
NOTE: The use of any other version of IPMITool will result in an ex-
ceptionally long update duration (in the order of 2 hours as opposed
to approximately 20 minutes with the optimized tool).
2. Run the following command at the Linux prompt from the x86
3. Once the x86 has rebooted, run the following command:
4. Verify that the active firmware component versions match those

10.2.1. Upgrade Files

The upgrade files specified in this section can be found in the moth-
erboard sub-folder in this package, which contains a file of the form:
0956373-XX_Butser2_Motherboard_XX.hpm – HPM upgrade file
containing BIOS, FPGA and BMC updates.
10.2.2. Optimized IPMITool
An optimized version of IPMITool v1.8.11 is required to update the
BIOS, FPGA and BMC firmware.
This optimized variant has only been tested on SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server 11 – 64 bit, but it should build and run correctly on all Linux
variants normally supported by IPMITool, as long as the Open IPMI
drivers and libraries are installed.
is required. At this
This optimized version is available from the IPMITool CVS code re-
pository. It is currently recommended to download the latest code,
create a patch against v1.8.11 (as detailed below), and distribute
this patch throughout your company.
LaCie will provide notifications for any future enhancements to IP-
MITool that are required by the 12big Storage Server; a request has
been made to the IPMITool project administrators to allow the cor-
rect file revisions to be extracted via tags in the future.
1. Download IPMITool v1.8.11 using wget:
2. Decompress the IPMITool archive:
OS:
ipmitool -z 250 hpm upgrade 0956373-XX_But-
ser2_Motherboard_XX.hpm all activate
where the 'XX' symbols represent version numbers.
Once the update process has completed, there will be an auto-
matic reboot of the x86 processor to activate the updates.
ipmitool hpm check
in the release notes.
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/
project/ipmitool/ipmitool/1.8.11/ipmi-
tool-1.8.11.tar.gz?use_mirror=cdnetworks-
us-1
Upgrading the Firmware
page 66