QUESTION - Best time to start a DFM upgrade while running Protection Manager backups

[emanuel]

Hello all

I will need to upgrade a DFM server that is very busy with Protection Manager jobs.  I have listed the time slots that Jobs are issued and have found a number of gaps where we can upgrade DFM however as jobs are started, DFM/PM does track them - as you would see in the "completed job steps" and some of these jobs could take hours to complete.

so my question is ... I have a good 6 hour gap, if I start my upgrade at hour 1 in the gap, Protection Manager will probably go offline during the upgrade but will it be able to catchup on the "job steps" after the upgrade?  Since Protection Manager issues the commands the controllers to start the backup/mirror updates, after issuing it has no need to send any more commands to manage the backup because the controllers are doing that.

I should be OKAY to update after all jobs have been started.

Thanks, Emanuel

[sinhaa]

Hi emanual,

     Its defnitey NOT OKAY to start an upgrade when any of the dfm jobs are in running state. Upgrade always takes priority and for which the dfm services will be stopped and this abruptly ends the currently running jobs. The Jobs are NOT PAUSED and hence they won't be able to continue from the point where the dfm services stopped them. So it will definitelt not be able to catchup on the job steps after the upgrade. If your jobs are scheduled, DFM will attempt to start when the next time comes but that also depends on how the state of thing are after the last job run failed.  For e.g. for Online migration, you'll need to run migrate fix before you can do anything else with that vfiler. Thats why this is definitely not adviced.

However as in you mentioned below:

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Since Protection Manager issues the commands the controllers to start the backup/mirror updates, after issuing it has no need to send any more commands to manage the backup because the controllers are doing that.

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So  on DFM those job will be shown as failed and their actual status may not be captured and shown in DFM results. Also their success of failure even on the controller side depends on at what point dfm server stopped. Even if everything passed from controller side, this result however may not be updated on DFM db and could still possibly affect the next scheduled job-run.

warm regards,

Abhishek

[emanuel]

Hello Abhishek

Thanks for the response; it sounds like i will need to suspend upcoming jobs before i perform an upgrade.  This DFM server is active round the clock with various sites around the world.

Emanuel

[sinhaa]

Emanuel, This could be of inconvinience and of serious nature too, but there is no other option. An upgrade always brings along some downtime.