Beware Dell PowerConnect firmware upgrade

We had a bit of a hair-pulling here at eSpares this morning. The plan was to upgrade the firmware in the Dell PowerConnect 6224 switches in one of our testing environments.

Moving from version 3.2.1.3 to 3.3.1.10. According to the documentation it should’ve been a no-brainer, firmware release notes had nothing of concern, but after applying the update our iSCSI network was inaccessible and VMware was having a fit.

After much aggravation we found the culprit. The firmware upgrade reconfigured some of the ports on the switch, re-enabling STP and changing the VLAN config from untagged to tagged. Re-applied our (source-controlled of course) configurations and it was back up and running.

Nothing is ever as easy or side-effect free as the documentation suggests.

Lesson learned.