I have an HMC that I'm looking to upgrade from V7.3.4.0 SP2 to the latest version V7.7.6.0. I'm looking at the firmware levels of the systems attached to this HMC, and all of the systems have compatible firmware revisions but there are two that have been update recently and the platform IPL level is still showing the older/incompatible revision. However the Activated level is showing a compatible revision.
My question is, can I still upgrade the HMC software to the newest version? Or do I have to re-IPL the 2 systems in question?
Managed systems have two sides to the firmware - temporary and permanent. I don't know if there is a way to manually move the temporary over to the permanent side, but I do know that moving it is the first step of any firmware upgrade. When I upgrade my HMC, I make sure that my that the side of the firmware my managed systems were booted from (usually the temporary side) are at firmware releases supported by the HMC code I'm going to install. If it all is compatible, then I do the upgrade. If your levels are all good with each other, you should be able to upgrade.
The firmware on the system is compatible. The problem is that because I did not re-IPL the system after upgrading, the HMC is seeing that the new firmware version is deferred till a re-IPL. However, the activated firmware version is that of the version I upgraded to.
I'm trying to find out if I need to re-IPL my managed systems for them to compatible with newer versions of HMC or if simply being the current activated version is good enough.
My first advice in such cases is to get a maintenance window RIGHT NOW. Not because of this occasion but because of general reasons. What happens right now will happen time and again and you don't want to always go out of your way to do cover for the bad planning of others.
It is a long established fact that absolutely every hardware fails from time to time and every system needs some downtime from time to time - either for maintenance or for said failure. If a customer doesn't want such a downtime he will have to cover for the extra costs to have redundant failover systems (HACMP or whatever else) so that the downtime can can be hidden. If he doesn't want to cover for the extra costs, i in turn will not cover for his extra demands - this simple.
Regarding your original question: what is your hardware? Depending on the model it might have two service processors.
Yes, they have. In this case there is only the IPL. If the HMC upgrade would work without the IPL or not i am not sure, but you should press the issue nevertheless, to establish a clean status of your systems. If something happens because of them not being clean (pretty unlikely, but why take the risk?) nobody will take responsibility (like "i designed the system poorly and did not take such necessary downtimes into account") and all will point at you as the SA.
You can "always" update the hmc because it knows about old firmware. You should NEVER update firmware before updating the HMC
Note:there are combinations of firmware and HMC that are not supported. That does not mean it will not work long enough for you to apply a firmware update.
Reasoning is simple. The are possible features in new firmware that old HMC code does not know, so cannot support. Sometimes there are changes made to data structures in PHYP such that the HMC cannot communicate with managed system, or could even corrupt HMC presentation of the system with new firmware.
I just got off the phone with IBM support over this matter. It turns out that the HMC update I'm trying to do will work without re-IPL'ing my managed systems.
The only thing they warned me about was making sure that my managed systems were set to boot from the temporary firmware which was compatible with the newer versions of the HMC.
Finally got around to running this upgrade. Everything went fine. The one problem I ran into was that I was not able to upgrade directly from 7.3.4.0 to 7.7.6.0. I had to upgrade first to 7.7.5.0, the from there I was able to upgrade to the latest.