Nutanix, Inc.
SCHEDULING FIRMWARE OPERATIONS IN DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEMS

Abstract:

Systems for managing firmware updates in a computing system. A computing system comprises multiple computing nodes. A plurality of computing nodes include firmware-upgradable components from multiple vendors. When upgrading the firmware of components of the computing system, a firmware management agent is invoked to interact with firmware management plug-ins through an abstraction layer. The abstraction layer translates vendor-agnostic firmware operations into vendor-specific firmware operations. The firmware management agent determines the then-current status of the firmware-upgradable components and issues a series of vendor-agnostic firmware commands to initiate firmware upgrades over the computing nodes of the computing system. The firmware management agent generates and manages a firmware update schedule to sequence or parallelize firmware updates across multiple nodes of the computing system. Some schedules include a temporary suspension or migration of tasks that rely on any of the firmware-upgradable components. Collisions during concurrent updates are avoided through use of atomic access operations.