Updating Cassandra and ZooKeeper

You can update Cassandra and ZooKeeper in Global Mailbox and preserve the values that are set in the previous versions. You must update Cassandra and ZooKeeper before you update any other components.

Prepare for the update. For more information, see Upgrading Global Mailbox.
Important: IBM JDK 8 should be installed before upgrading Cassandra nodes to V6.0. The installer confirms the version of JDK 8 at the path that is provided during installation. An error message is displayed if the path is not to the correct version of Java.

If you plan to use the existing response file to upgrade, ensure that you changed the old keys to new keys in the response file. For more information, see Old and new key names for ZooKeeper and Cassandra.

To update Cassandra and ZooKeeper, complete the following steps:

  1. On the node where the Global Mailbox is installed, start the IBM Installation Manager.
  2. Click Global Mailbox > Next to open the package group.
  3. Under Global Mailbox Prerequisite Installation, select the following options:
    • Global Mailbox Cassandra Node
    • Global Mailbox Zookeeper Node
    Important: If you are doing a rolling upgrade, i.e. when one data center (DC) is actively processing traffic while the other is being upgraded, stop all of the instances of Reaper on all DCs before you continue. You can stop Reaper by running GlobalMailbox/MailboxUtilities/bin/stopGMDataReaper.sh.
  4. Click Update.
  5. Select Version > Update.
  6. Repeat steps 1 through 5 for all of the nodes sequentially within the data center and for all data centers.
    Important:
    • You must update all software components on all nodes for a successful update. If Cassandra and ZooKeeper are installed on the same system, you must update both at the same time. If a component is not selected, it is not updated and is uninstalled.
    • When you upgrade the Cassandra node, an additional port for Cassandra Reaper web is used. The default value for the Cassandra Reaper HTTP port is 7080. You can change this port number during installation.
    Tip: During the update, IIM keeps a copy of the ports that are specified during the installation and uses the same port numbers when it builds a response file. The response file that is generated after changing the ports contains the old port numbers. However, you can use the same response file for updating all other nodes successfully.
    The installer retains the previous configurations of the cassandra.yaml, cassandra-env.sh, and zoo.cfg files.
  7. After all of the nodes are updated, restart all nodes.
  • Cassandra is updated to version 3.11.
  • Manual repairs for Cassandra are not required. Cassandra Reaper automatically does the repairs as required.
Updating the Global Mailbox Management Node binaries