Upgrading and updating your Db2 or Db2 Warehouse on Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes

Your Db2 or Db2 Warehouse on Red Hat OpenShift deployment is auto-upgradable and auto-updatable by design. The automation to upgrade or update your Db2 server is fully encapsulated by the container automation.

Warning: Upgrading your Db2® Operator to version 110508.0.3 causes your Db2 engine pods to restart if you are using the Db2uInstance CR and you have a separate tempts storage area. See Restoring separate temporary table space storage after upgrading to Db2 Operator version 110508.0.3 for more information.

Attention: After an upgrade, if you run the Wolverine command

wvcli system
status

within the Db2 pod, you might see a message stating that the High Availability (HA) Management is stopped. To resolve this issue, you need to bring Wolverine back to a health and started state. For more information, see HA Management is STOPPED error after upgrading Db2 on OpenShift.

Note: When upgrading to Db2 or Db2 Warehouse 11.5.9.0 cn2, the Db2 operator manages the TLS certificate keychain. If you do not provide a certificate when deploying your Db2uInstance or Db2uCluster custom resource, the operator issues a new certificate and mounts it on your custom resource. The values of the new certificate are stored in a secret and you must run the following command to retrieve them:

export DB2U= <db2ucluster/instance name>
oc extract secret/c-${DB2U}-db2ssl

Upgrading the Db2 Operator

Because of the automatic control that your Db2 Operator has on the configuration of your Db2 or Db2 Warehouse on OpenShift® deployment, the upgrade and update options available to you are determined by the Operator.

The table below lists the Db2 Operators that have been released in the version 1.x, 2.x, and 3.0 channels, and their supported Db2 versions for deployment on OpenShift.

Table 1. Db2 Operators and their associated engines
Db2 Operator version	Db2 Operator upgrade channel	Db2 Engine version	OCP Version	Container Application Software for Enterprises (CASE) version	sha
120100.0.0	v120100.0	s12.1.0.0	4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16, 4.17	7.0.0+20241023.082052.11505	icr.io/cpopen/ibm-db2uoperator-catalog@sha256:1cfbfba362cd70e6ce10742b36942e1d0d717c039b6d1544586e9ce5d3c0718d
120101.0.0	v120101.0	s12.1.1.0	4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16, 4.17	7.1.1+20250117.153233.12631	icr.io/cpopen/ibm-db2uoperator-catalog@sha256:d669d2287fe44e3bb66495ad27a151f0086dbe3cb907dc64ed7d959afba534be
120101.0.1	v120101.0	s12.1.1.0-cn1	4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16, 4.17, 4.18	7.1.2+20250225.203119.13354	icr.io/cpopen/ibm-db2uoperator-catalog@sha256:d6b6fcd8be9359bc8854fb314a6a73b6b5018d3dda2a005a1d16f8b15b18d1a8
120102.0.0 (Latest)	v120102.0	s12.1.2.0	4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16, 4.17, 4.18	7.2.0+20250522.212407.15144	icr.io/cpopen/ibm-db2uoperator-catalog@sha256:9f141cf4aad1fe5bbc7ab395bc02eab2b43cca56a9b7cf05c1076e3788d6ad4a

Warning: Upgrading your Db2 Operator to version 110508.0.1 causes your Db2 or Db2 Warehouse engine pods to restart. For more information on how to avoid this restart, see Avoiding Db2 engine pod restarts when upgrading the Db2 Operator to version 110508.0.1.

Attention:

There is a known issue that affects any upgrade from Db2 or Db2 Warehouse Standalone 5.0.0 (s11.5.8.0). Upgrading from Db2 or Db2 Warehouse Standalone 5.0.0 (s11.5.8.0) causes the pod to restart and results in unplanned, unexpected downtime. Plan accordingly around this upgrade.

When the db2u-operator is upgraded, the operand image registries in the db2u-releases cm are updated. This update causes a reconciliation with the db2u-0 head pod. As a result, the pod restarts, and there is downtime.

The table below lists the Db2 Operator channels and the Db2 or Db2 Warehouse engine versions they support.

Table 2. Db2 Operator channels and supported Db2 engine versions
Channel	Db2 engine version
v120100.0	12.1.0.0
v120101.0	12.1.1.0