As I contemplate upgrading all my old filers from 4.x to 5.x, I was wondering what the horror stories are out there. Or is this truly a simple upgrade?
The only problem we've had is the result of subtle changes to the dump/restore commands.
The dump command changed slightly if you use the blocksize option. The restore command now outputs additional text that screwed up some of our restore scripts.
More specifically, in 5.1 (not 5.0) we don't allow tape record sizes greater than 64KB and we default to 63KB (rather than 10KB).
The upper bound was added because we added a new no-copy path from disk to tape for dump. Various tape driver limitations force us to stay to 64KB tape record sizes. We felt the performance benefit was worth the change. If you feel differently let us - David Yu:davidy@netapp.com(marketing), Grant Melvin:grant@netapp.com(manager) and me(some dude) know.
Don't worry, though, restore can handle the old block sizes that we allowed in previous releases.
The default was changed because: A) most people thought that our default already WAS 63KB B) Restore has always defaulted to 63KB.
The output change is that every restore output message is preceded by "RESTORE:" every dump message by "DUMP:". We added this to help us diagnose situations when a customer says "I got this error message." and it could be coming from dump, restore, or the fabulous new SnapCopy!
Hopefully Graham and everybody else haven't been/won't be terribly inconvenienced.
Stephen