Upgrading
To upgrade to a newer version of IBM Storage Scale, first consider the version that you are upgrading from and then consider coexistence and compatibility issues.
- Within a cluster, limited backward compatibility enables you to perform an online upgrade to the new IBM Storage Scale version of the code if an online upgrade from your current version to the newer version is supported.
- In a multicluster environment, limited backward compatibility allows the individual clusters to be upgraded on their own schedules. Access to the file system data can be preserved even though some of the clusters might still be running at an earlier version.
- In multicluster environments, it is recommended to upgrade the home cluster before the cache cluster especially if file audit logging, watch folder, clustered watch, and AFM functions are being used.
Online upgrades allow you to install new IBM Storage Scale code on one node at a time while maintaining access to the file systems without shutting down IBM Storage Scale on other nodes. However, you must upgrade all nodes within a short time. The time dependency exists because some IBM Storage Scale features in the newer version become available on each node as soon as the node is upgraded, while other features are not available until you upgrade all participating nodes.
For information about the upgrade process flow used by the installation toolkit, see Upgrade process flow. You can use this process flow as a reference for doing manual upgrades on Linux® nodes.
After all nodes are upgraded to the new code, you must finalize the upgrade by running the commands mmchconfig release=LATEST and mmchfs -V full (or mmchfs -V compat). Also, certain new features might require you to run the mmmigratefs command to enable them. For more information, see Completing the upgrade to a new level of IBM Storage Scale.
For the latest information on upgrade, coexistence, and compatibility, see the Supported OS and software versions section of IBM Storage Scale FAQ in IBM® Documentation.
IBM Storage Scale upgrade consists of these topics: