Windows 2003 Server With EMC Hardware Connected Will Crash if Win 2003 SP1 is Loaded by Mr. Tweak

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Entire site by Mike Bijon. I was IT manager at a major regional accounting firm in Southern California, now I'm a Technologist and Development Manager at Team One an advertising firm. Information and opinions on this site do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer or clients. Read my personal site, Moogle1, for "opinionated" articles about search, internet business, and life on the web.

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1 comment Windows 2003 Server With EMC Hardware Connected Will Crash if Win 2003 SP1 is Loaded
Posted SAN & NAS Storage, Windows 2003 Server, Techie News on Friday, May 20th, 2005.

We run a Dell-branded EMC SAN at a regional office. After hearing that Windows 2003 Server SP1 is a clean service pack that has caused very few software errors or conflicts I was considering installing it on a test server. Fortunately I had other reasons to call Dell’s EMC team today and brought up SP1.

Do not install SP1 on Windows 2003 Servers connected to Dell/EMC SANs (and possibly EMC SANs). The Dell technician I spoke with mentioned being very busy this week removing SP1 from Windows 2003 servers that had gone BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). The Dell tech expects EMC to release updates to the Navisphere and/or PowerPath software to solve these issues soon.

My Future Testing Plans:
An interesting point in this is to always test all aspects of a production environment. This doesn’t mean to duplicate the production environment, especially in a medium-to-small company like mine. Not everyone can afford test labs like Microsoft, or even Fortune 1000 companies with “retired” SAN hardware in a closet. It would probably suffice to keep a workstation on the shelf with Windows Server 2003 and an HBA installed. During a late night or weekend window try to connect the SAN to the workstation’s HBA and install SP1. While you’re at it, throw a few minutes of the free IOMeter at the connection to see if the problems Dell’s tech mentioned can be found before rolling something into production.

Based on some good news in the media I almost took a chance that could have made for even more work and downtime. I got lucky, but I won’t depend on it next time.

One Response to “Windows 2003 Server With EMC Hardware Connected Will Crash if Win 2003 SP1 is Loaded”

Windows Dynamic Disks Fail at Startup on EMC iSCSI Storage Arrays by Mr. Tweak - Windows Network & Admin Tweaks, on June 15th, 2005 at 7:56 pm, said:

[…] ead of iSCSI. (A May 2005 article also mentions that loading Windows 2003 Server SP1 will result in crashes due to either Navi […]

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