Re: Upgrade thoughts: 8.3 -> 9.1 -> 9.3

Douglas> Did you have a look at fastpath?

I did, and I think I'm all ok because most of my SVMs have just one
network associated with them, and I've also moved all my management
off to a completely seperate subnet.

Our cluster is stupid simple, just 4 x 10gb LACP trunks from each node
(4 nodes total) with a number of VLANs running over those trunks.  the
SVMs are reasonably designed, though we did make some mistakes many
years ago when we first set things up that I would do differently
now.  

Douglas> https://whyistheinternetbroken.wordpress.com/2018/02/16/ipfastpath-ontap92/
Douglas> It seems every time we put in a case for upgrades to 9.3
Douglas> netapp support tries to make sure we looked into this! So it
Douglas> must've bitten a lot of folks.

I think so.  I hope we're all set.  

Douglas> We did run into a pretty big bug on the upgrade from 9.1 to
Douglas> 9.3P15 -- we have a case/core in now.  I've seen nfs stop
Douglas> serving from a node in at least 3 clusters roughly a 2-5
Douglas> hours after the upgrade. We fix it by indicating the
Douglas> unresponsive node and either powering it down, or via NMI/SP.
Douglas> It will not respond to normal takeover commands. Preliminary
Douglas> core analysis (no full core analysis yet) points at at least
Douglas> 1 bug fixed in 9.3P17.

Yikes!  That is a big bug to have to deal with.  


Douglas> https://mysupport.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=1236722

Douglas> Typically when we roll updates it can take months given the
Douglas> number of nodes and clusters. So we stick with whatever P
Douglas> patch we rolled on the first set of nodes, and then by the
Douglas> end of upgrades 1-3 P patches are released.

You have a much bigger environment than we have!  I think next time we
might do smaller pairs of nodes, so we can just VMotion VMs back and
forth and hopefully have enough space to be a bit more proactive on
upgrades without disrupting everything with a full shutdown.  

Douglas> With this experience, always use the latest P patch possible
Douglas> on the intermediary update especially if you are going to
Douglas> take a bit to roll it through your entire deployment. I also
Douglas> recommend taking a look at going to 9.5, it sounds nuts, but
Douglas> we've had better stability with this release. We move to this
Douglas> release because of a specific feature that was needed
Douglas> (CIFS/SMB enhancements, and flexcache/flexgroups).

I had thought of going that far up, but just getting the downtime for
the two jumps I need to do has been hard enough.  But we're learning
our lesson and trying to do upgrades more frequently.  We only have
this one cluster though and it runs everything.  



Douglas> On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 4:41 PM John Stoffel <[email protected]> wrote:

Douglas>     Guys,
   
Douglas>     We're getting ready to ugprade our 4 node 8060 cluster from 8.3.2P9 to
Douglas>     9.1P19 and then onto 9.3P17, all this weekend.  My only real concern
Douglas>     is the upgrade from 9.1 to 9.3, which lists a major warning for bug
Douglas>     1250500:
   
Douglas>       Expired truststore security certificates causing upgrade and
Douglas>       new installation failures.
   
Douglas>     Unfortunately, I can't run an upgrade advisor report for my cluster
Douglas>     going from 9.1P19 to 9.3P17, because I'm not yet running 9.1, and it
Douglas>     can take upto a week for the autosupport data to get pushed to Upgrade
Douglas>     Advisor.  Sigh...
   
Douglas>     Has anyone run into this issue when doing the 9.1 -> 9.3 upgrade with
Douglas>     the expired certificate?  Otherwise, it all looks good, my cluster
Douglas>     switches are supported at their current version, etc.
   
Douglas>     John
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