Blade Watch

I got an email asking if I had any plans/emails/notes on how to do a simple task. Peter has just started as a Project Manager and his project is to upgrade the service pack on their 300 HP and Dell servers.  He knows what a service pack is, but wonders how I would do this.  

At this point, I shall make my stance and say could the vendors, whether it’s Microsoft or the hardware vendors not consider a few bullet points/blog posts about this?

Surely it’s something they have to do internally anyway, it seems a shame that we don’t exchange ideas and best practice in these kind of areas.

People will always have varied successes and everyone’s situation is different, but the commonalities are remain the same. Anyway, here’s a brief to do list:

• Get the list of servers in scope.
• Have your server guy check if the drivers/layered components will need updated – check any SAN storage in particular, it can cause the server to blue screen if the drivers aren’t upgraded.
• Split via application and then by status – you want to do development servers first, typically by business line starting off with internal low impact systems to prove the concept, noting any specific requirements per box and schedule that into your plan and plan per server.
• Raise the relevant paper work and contact each business line or application team in scope – ask for the appropriate outage window, based on this we can create a schedule of what can be done when and resource accordingly.  Can we do development in the evening after work has finished?
• Establish whether you need resources to be on site, consider if you’ve got four engineers, for the sake of effort it might be best to have an engineer on site in case any SAN storage cables need removed, disks swapped or servers nursed back to health.
• Establish the plan and publish to all stakeholders.

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