Upgrading IBM Storage Scale components with the installation toolkit

You can use the installation toolkit to do an upgrade of almost all IBM Storage Scale components from the current version of IBM Storage Scale to the wanted version. These components include core GPFS, NFS, SMB, object, HDFS, management GUI, file audit logging, and performance monitoring. The installation toolkit can be used to do an online upgrade, an entire cluster offline upgrade, or an upgrade with a subset of nodes offline or excluded to meet your environment needs.
For more information about the upgrade phases and the flow of the upgrade procedure that is done by using the installation toolkit, see Upgrade process flow.
Important:
  • Protocol upgrades are non-concurrent and they cause brief outages to user access. Schedule an outage window during the upgrade, which is approximately 12 minutes per protocol node.
    • Before upgrading from IBM Storage Scale 5.0.x to 5.1.x, remove the gpfs.nfs-ganesha-selinux package if it is present in the protocol node. If the gpfs.nfs-ganesha-selinux package is not removed, it might break the NFS Ganesha upgrade process.
    • Before upgrading from IBM Storage Scale 5.0.x to 5.1.x on the Ubuntu operating system, make sure that the upstream NFS Ganesha package is not installed or configured in the protocol nodes. If the NFS Ganesha package is installed or configured, uninstall the package by using the apt purge nfs-ganesha command.
    • For NFS upgrade, quiesce all I/O during the upgrade. During the NFS upgrade, I/O pauses occur and depending upon the client, NFS mounts and disconnects.
    • SMB requires quiescing all I/O during the upgrade. Due to the SMB clustering functions, differing SMB levels cannot co-exist within a cluster at the same time. This restriction requires a full outage of SMB during the upgrade.
    • For object upgrade, quiesce all I/O during the upgrade. The object service is down or interrupted at multiple times during the upgrade process. Clients might experience errors or they might be unable to connect during this time. They must retry as needed.
  • Before you proceed with the IBM Storage Scale upgrade, ensure that Transparent cloud tiering is not active on the cluster. If it is active, shut down Transparent cloud tiering services on all nodes by issuing the mmcloudgateway service stop command. If Transparent cloud tiering is active, the IBM Storage Scale upgrade might fail.
  • If you are upgrading from IBM Storage Scale 5.0.0 or earlier versions and you store your LDAP, AD, or GUI SSL configuration in /opt/ibm/wlp/usr/servers/gpfsgui/server.xml then you need to back up your settings. After the upgrade, recreate your configuration with mkldap for LDAP or AD and with sethttpskeystore for GUI SSL certificates. For more information, see Configuring external authentication for GUI users .
Before you proceed with upgrade by using the installation toolkit, ensure that you do the following steps:
  • The prerequisite steps for using the installation toolkit are done. Doing these prerequisite steps are important if you are using the installation toolkit to upgrade a cluster that was created manually. For more information, see Preparing to use the installation toolkit.
  • Review limitations of the installation toolkit related to upgrade. For more information, see Limitations of the installation toolkit.
For doing an upgrade by using the installation toolkit, a key requirement is the cluster definition file that you can create or update by using one of the following ways.
  • Use the ./spectrumscale config populate command to retrieve the cluster configuration and populate it in the cluster definition file.
  • Manually enter the configuration into the cluster definition file by using the ./spectrumscale command options.
For more information about obtaining the current cluster configuration, see Performing online upgrade by using the installation toolkit.
Important: You can enable the prompt to administrators to shut down their workloads before starting the upgrade by using the following command.
./spectrumscale upgrade config workloadprompt -N Node1,Node2,...
The prompt is displayed on every specified node. You can also enable workload prompt on all nodes in the cluster definition file by using the -N all option of the command.
Note: You can skip package dependency check during the Toolkit upgrade precheck by using the following command.
./spectrumscale upgrade precheck --skip pkg-dependency-check

Upgrading by using the installation toolkit

For more information on upgrading HDFS, see Upgrading CES HDFS Transparency in IBM Storage Scale: Big data and analytics support.

Upgrading nodes that have efix installed

You can use the installation toolkit to upgrade nodes that have an efix that is installed.

Installing new functions after upgrade

You can use the installation toolkit to install new functions that are available in the new version that you upgraded to and that are supported by the installation toolkit. Use the following steps to do so:
  1. Enable the functions in the cluster definition file by using the installation toolkit.
  2. Issue the ./spectrumscale install or the ./spectrumscale deploy command.

Failure recovery

In case the upgrade does not complete successfully, certain steps need to be done to identify the issue and take appropriate action to recover from the upgrade failure. For more information, see Upgrade issues and Upgrade recovery.