A cluster supports automatic drive firmware updates for new and replacement drives, as part of the nondisruptive firmware update process. Firmware updates are delivered using drive support packages, which both simplify and streamline the management of existing and new drives across the cluster. This ensures that drive firmware is up to date and mitigates the likelihood of failures due to known drive issues. As such, automatic drive firmware updates are an important component of OneFS high availability and nondisruptive operations strategy. Drive and node firmware can be applied as either a rolling upgrade or by a full cluster reboot.
Before OneFS 8.2, node firmware updates had to be installed one node at a time, which was a time-consuming operation especially in large clusters. Node firmware updates can now be choreographed across a cluster by providing a list of nodes to be simultaneously updated. The upgrade helper tool can be used to select a combination of nodes that can be updated simultaneously and an explicit list of nodes that should not be updated together (for example, nodes in a node-pair).