At 15:20, on Feb 25, 2004, jeff.mery@ni.com wrote:
We've also done rolling upgrades of DOT as mentioned below on our old F760 cluster. Upgrade one head, fail over, reboot that head, giveback, upgrade the other head, fail over, reboot the second head, and giveback. The first head will complain that it's not at the same DOT level as its partner, but we've never had a problem with data integrity. This also only happens for a short period between the first giveback and the second failover. I don't know if this is supported or not so as always, test if you can.
One note, we've never done this for major version upgrades (i.e. 5.x to 6.x) this way. IIRC we've only done minor version upgrades this way (i.e. 6.4.1 to 6.4.2 or 6.4.1P2 to 6.4.2).
Jeff
Does this work? Is it safe?
We've always been told fairly explicitly by NetApp that this will not work. And have never tried it, for risk of ending up in an unstable or inconsistent state.
I've always wished that I could do this - because with many other devices, this is a standard method of using a clustered-pair of devices to avoid a downtime, while doing an OS upgrade. But NetApp has never supported it.
Davin.