On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Walt Zapor wrote:
Its our first time on our first filer and the docs that come with the upgrade are vague. For instance what do we do with the 4 boot disks. Are they used for the upgrade process?
You generally do not need to do anything "special" going from minor release to minor release (even from 5.x to 6.x, in most situations). For the majority of OS upgrades, you simply untar/unzip the new /etc files over top of the old ones (there is a script that will do that for you), then run the "download" command on the filer to update the boot blocks on the drives, and reboot. That is pretty much it.
Be sure to consult the minimum firmware version requirements for the particular hardware model and OS version you are moving to. I recently upgraded from a pair of F740s running 5.3.x to a pair of F840's running 6.1.1R2, keeping the same drives. I had to upgrade the firmware on the F840's before they could run 6.1.1R2, and because I was switching from Alpha (F740) to Intel (F840), I also had to boot from floppy first. Still, with judicious planning, the service outage per Netapp was less than 5 minutes. The easy part was installing the new 6.1.1R2 /etc files!