Pure1's Self-Service Upgrade
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What is Pure1's Self-Service Upgrade feature?
Upgrading a Pure Storage FlashArray has always been a painless process via Pure's assisted upgrades. Up until late 2022, one would simply open a ticket inside Pure1, select the array they want upgraded, the version they want to upgrade it to and pick an open time for the upgrade to be performed. Two days prior to the scheduled time, the customer would enable Remote Assist (RA) so a Pure Support Engineer could connect into the array to stage the new code and run a health check. If the health check looked good, the engineer would contact you on the scheduled day letting you know the array upgrade was going to begin, and then again an hour later when the upgrade was completed. It is really an easy process and reduced the risk by having Pure support involved.
Well, the easy just got easier. Pure introduced Self-Service Upgrades in late 2022 for the FlashArrays storage line running 6.2.10+ or 6.3.1+ code that also have edge services enabled. Pure1 Edge Service (PES) provides secure communications between management applications in the Pure1 Cloud and companion applications on supported Purity//FA systems.
Read the Whitepaper for more information.
If you haven't requested access to PES just yet, you can do so by navigating to Administration > Edge Service within Pure1 and requesting access through the landing page. As part of the setup, you're account will be enabled for Step-Up authentication which is a two-factor authentication process where a secure code is texted to your mobile device.
Once your account is enabled for PES, Edge Services is quick to enable on the FlashArray via two Purity CLI commands.
Review Pure1 Edge Service Best Practices before enabling the service.
- pureuser@flasharray:~# puresupport enable edge-management
- pureuser@flasharray:~# puresupport enable edge-agent-update
Once the few requirements above are met, performing a Self-Service Upgrade is quick and straight forward via the Software Lifecycle section in Pure1. Simply select the array you want to upgrade, run a health check for the selected target version, stage the download bundle to the array and install.
Multiple health checks are run throughout the upgrade process and give you an option to cancel the upgrade and downgrade the secondary controller software version if the mid-point health check fails before the controller switchover happens. These built-in mechanisms help to keep you out of trouble in the event the environment changes during the upgrade process and I can speak first-hand that they will protect you and the downgrade process works.
Like with many things, seeing is believing. Check out the Self-Service Upgrade video of a FlashArray running 6.2.16 that was upgraded to 6.3.11 non-disruptively in under 50 minutes.
While the Pure assisted upgrades are not going away, and will still be the route that many of our customers take for upgrading their FlashArrays, you do have another option available via the new Self-Service Upgrade feature added in Pure1.