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Writing about my obsession with firmware and drivers.  The reason I routinely write about firmware and drivers is that it’s good best practice.  Your vendor/service provider will want you to be running the latest supported version of the drivers and firmware to ‘be in support’. With that in mind it’s good general practice to be keeping both up to date.

Keep in mind the following:

• Upgrading the drivers might necessitate a driver upgrade – read the instructions or if in doubt ask
• Upgrading the firmware might need to be done offline (rebooting the server first then booting from a device with the image)
• Drivers/layered software might have dependent components – the network driver and card software are examples or the management devices/system peripherals.
• Firmware could affect the operating system, on Windows NT (apologies for repeating myself), one of the roll up packs required your array controller firmware and drivers to be a specific version
• Drivers need to be tested – new drivers need to be tested on your environment for functionality as does the firmware.
• In the fibre card world, your firmware, your drivers and the fibre switches/uplinks might need specific options set and drivers/components loaded to work.
• Firmware upgrades might need to be done in incremental steps, for example 1.4 to 1.92 on the HP ILO firmware should work but is quite a change in one go.
• It’s the lowest level, your firmware underpins your operating system, get your operating system and your platform, optimized, secured and operating as it should and everything else will follow.

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