EMC – VNX: USM reports an error “Assistance needed for upgrade”

Posted on 2014-04-14 by dan

If you’re trying to do an OE upgrade on a VNX you might get the following error after you’ve run through the “Prepare for Installation” phase.

Turns out you just need to upgrade USM to the latest version. You can do this manually or via USM. Further information on this error can be found on support.emc.com by searching for the following Primus ID: emc321171.

Incidentally, I’d just like to congratulate EMC on how much simpler it is upgrade FLARE / VNX OE nowadays than it was when I first started on FC and CX arrays. Sooo much nicer …

EMC – Sometimes it’s best not to pay too much attention to USM

Posted on 2013-01-08 by dan

Just a quick one to start the year off on the right note. I was installing updated Utility Partition software on our lab CX4s today and noticed that USM was a bit confused as to when it had started installing a bit of the code. Notice the Time started and Time elapsed section. Well, I thought it was amusing.

Updated Articles page

Posted on 2012-04-17 by dan

A few months ago someone asked me if I had documentation on how to do FLARE upgrades on a CLARiiON. I’d taken a video last year, but realised that it used the old Navisphere Service Taskbar and covered the upgrade of a CX700 to FLARE 26. So, basically, my doco was a little out of date.

I recently had the opportunity to upgrade some of our CX4-120s to the latest release of FLARE 30 (.524), so thought it might be an opportune moment to document the process in a visual sense. Once I’d completed the articles, I realised this may have been done better with a series of videos. Maybe next time. In any case, here’s a four-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4) on how to upgrade FLARE on a CX4 using Unisphere Service Manager. It’s a classic death-by-screenshot scenario, and I apologise in advance for the size of the files. While we’re talking about documentation, have a look through the rest of the articles page, there might be something useful there. And if you want something covered specifically, I do take requests.

EMC Unisphere – Basics – Part 3 – Installing USM

Posted on 2010-12-16 by dan

I’ve added a new “death by screenshot” article to my articles page. It covers the installation of USM and some basics. For those of you playing at home, USM is the new NST. Which was the new SIW. Which was … You get the picture.

emc252623 – USM – ‘Accept Always’ button is greyed out

Posted on 2010-12-07 by dan

There is a problem with USM where you’ll get the error message: “Java certificate store is not present on client workstation. Certificates cannot be permanently accepted. The Certificate from this system in not trusted. Click accept to continue.” As a result of this the “Accept Always” button for Certificate acceptance is greyed out. Only the “Accept for Session” button is available for selection. The cause, as EMC point out, is that the Java certificate store trusted.jssecerts file is missing on the workstation.

I had this problem with USM version V1.0.0.1.0490 so I upgraded to V1.0.5.1.0052, thinking that an upgrade would resolve the issue. No dice. So I used the second method discussed in emc252623 to accept the certificates to my machine. However, when I checked in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\security, I could not find the trusted.jssecerts file.

The reason for this was kind of silly, but made sense in the end. Our CX4-960 is called sandc10003 and sandc10004. However the SPs identify as A-IMAGE and B-IMAGE. This is some kind of FLARE 29 thing where, regardless of the number of times we rename the SPs, reboots cause it to reset to A-IMAGE and B-IMAGE. So the presented certs get confused.

What I had to do was login to the array, and accept the Java Security Warning.

The trusted.jssecerts file was then created on my workstation. Once this was present, I logged into USM, and was able to accept the certificates permanently. Hooray.