On the hardware side, I can vouch for the others. There's no problem working on the "failed" head while serving data from the other. We've done it many times on our old hardware and plan to do it on our new F940 cluster when we need to.
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
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Scott Miller skottie@anim.dreamworks.com Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com 02/24/2004 03:08 PM
To Kerry Herschel margaret.k.herschel@jpl.nasa.gov cc Geoff Hardin geoff.hardin@dalsemi.com, toasters toasters@mathworks.com Subject Re: Cluster failover question
Kerry Herschel wrote:
Can you upgrade one side and bring it up running a different DOT version
from it's partner? And then have it takeover the partner, then down the partner to upgrade it?
I always upgrade DOT to the same version on both heads of a cluster at the same time, and reboot them both a the same time. depending on your config, a DOT upgrade causes a 90 - 180 second outage for the reboot.
-skottie