Upgrade Path: 5.5 -6.0

[dreesedatalink]

I am wondering about what my upgrade path should be for an older 5.5 install.

We have started having blue screening issues on a San pair when one is rebooted gracefully the other blue screens and reboots. it has done this twice so far and we are up to date on support and licensing so i was going to upgrade to the latest version to resolve the problem. I am just wondering what should my upgrade path should be from this older version.

Should I upgrade to 5.8 then to 6.0? or just straight to 6.0? The San pair has 23 HA targets connected to xen 5.6fr1. and currently since the last blue screen only some of the HA targets are fully synced and back in HA the others are attached only from san2 still as HA but as an out of sync HA pair. do i need to get everything synchronized first? my fear in that is during the upgrade process with everything synced when SAN1 reboots from the upgrade that san2 will blue screen and i don't want to be restoring 15 servers to new targets all night long since it/I will not know which of the 2 data is valid.

Thanks,
Dave

[Alex (staff)]

Let us make some testing to check the upgrade path for 5.5. I'll write here in a day.

[dreesedatalink]

Let us make some testing to check the upgrade path for 5.5. I'll write here in a day.

Thanks,
Last night i went ahead and reattached the remaining out of sync targets and everything is fully in sync now. tonight i was planning on upgrading to do the following:

shutdown all VMs
detach all storage in xencenter
upgrade san1 to 5.8
let fast sync complete
upgrade san2 to 5.8
let fast sync complete
reattach one target to xencenter test boot then shut it down and again detach storage in xencenter
upgrade san1 to 6.0
let fast sync complete
upgrade san2 to 6.0
let fast sync complete
reattach all storage in xencenter
boot all VMs

then another night down everything again. detach all storage in xencenter, remove from starwind, reattach without sync but specify all the bells and whistles for the HA targets like user/sync priority and multiple sync channels.

Logically i think i have myself covered here with this plan.

Thanks,
Dave

[Alex (staff)]

You can't upgrade to 5.8 without taking storage offline. Both nodes must be updated from 5.5 to the latest version to sync HA devices.
There were some critical changes in the sync protocol of HA devices.

So the best way is the following:

1. Disconnect clients from HA device.
2. Turn off one node.
3. Install 6.0 over existing 5.5. on the second node.
4. Execute command "Mark as synchronized" through the context menu for each HA device.
5. Turn the second node on. Do not wait for synchronization of HA devices (they could not synchronize when one node is 5.5 and other 6.0).
Install 6.0 on this node.
6. At this point HA devices will start synchronization one-by one.
Now you can connect clients to one node, which has HA devices in "synchronized" state.
When synchonization has finished, you can connect clients to the second node.