Considerations for upgrading from an operating system not supported in IBM Storage Scale 5.1.x.x

In IBM Storage Scale 5.1.0.x, there are several changes in the operating system support matrix. Therefore, note the considerations that might apply to your environment and then plan the upgrade.

Use the installation toolkit for upgrading to IBM Storage Scale 5.1.x.x. You can also use the manual upgrade procedure, but it requires more steps to be done that the installation toolkit does automatically.

If you are upgrading from a release earlier than IBM Storage Scale 5.0.0, you can either use the offline upgrade procedure that requires complete cluster shutdown or do the upgrade in two hops.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Upgrading overview
• IBM Storage Scale supported upgrade paths
• Upgrading IBM Storage Scale components with the installation toolkit
• Offline upgrade with complete cluster shutdown
• Guidance for upgrading the operating system on IBM Storage Scale nodes
• Which Linux® distributions are supported by IBM Storage Scale? [IBM Storage Scale FAQ]

The following considerations apply if you are upgrading from an operating system that is not supported in IBM Storage Scale 5.1.x.x:

• After you upgrade to the new operating system, you might need to reinstall packages specific to the new operating system for some components such as performance monitoring, NFS, SMB, or GUI.
• The object protocol is not supported on Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x on IBM Storage Scale 5.1.x.x. If you want to continue to use the object protocol on Ubuntu or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x operating systems, it is advised to continue on IBM Storage Scale 5.0.x. System upgrade paths are as follows:

  Ubuntu 16.0.4 or 18.04

  1. Disable the object.
  2. Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.
  3. Upgrade to IBM Storage Scale 5.1.x.x.

  Note: Object services will not be available after the upgrade.

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 or earlier 7.x

  1. Stop object services.
  2. Clean up object packages. For more information, see Instructions for removing object protocol packages when upgrading protocol nodes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.x.
  3. Upgrade protocol nodes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 or later by using the Red Hat Leapp utility.
  4. Upgrade to IBM Storage Scale 5.1.x.x.

• If you have NFS or SMB enabled on SLES 12 nodes, you must disable NFS and SMB before you upgrade the operating system to SLES 15 and then you upgrade to IBM Storage Scale 5.1.x.x. You can enable SMB and NFS after these tasks are completed.
• If you have NFS or SMB enabled on Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 nodes, you must disable NFS and SMB before you upgrade the operating system to Ubuntu 20.04 and then you upgrade to IBM Storage Scale 5.1.x.x. You can enable SMB and NFS after these tasks are completed.