Hello Fellas,
If you have upgraded your ONTAP before you must have read or heard of three standard procedures recommended by NetApp in their NetApp upgrade guide. Here I explain the other way which I always used to upgrade Data ONTAP, right from my first upgrade couple of years ago. This procedure is nothing but a mix of two of the procedures defined by NetApp and there is no way it can go wrong theoritically. I Had performed over 30 filer ONTAP upgrades in different customer environments with a success rate of 100%.
This article doesnt talk about the upgrading disk f/w, Shelf firmware or microcode. It only talks about ONTAP upgrade and the prerequisite like firmware revisions still applicable and this is not gonna bypass any of them. If you feel this blog is little long then just scroll down to bottom and read last 3 paragraphs(Small ones) which is what I call My Way of upgrading.