Installing security updates as per ActiveIQ suggestions. What is the potential disruption?

Nazareth-College

Hi,

We are new to NetApp, and this is our first post in these forums. I did open a ticket with support asking this same question, but thought it would be worth while to reach out to the NetApp community as well. 

Our ActiveIQ suggestions are to install 4 security updates:

NTAP-20230214-0002
NTAP-20230110-0006
NTAP-20221209-0010
NTAP-20221209-0009

All 4 patches are indicated as "Potentially Non-disruptive."

We have two nodes in our AFF-A250 disk shelf, and 12 disks. 

This serves as our vSphere datastore, and since this will be the first time we apply any kind of patch or upgrade since we deployed the array, we are concerned that our vSphere environment will be impacted during the upgrade. 

From what I understand, each node will be upgraded separately, while the other node serves out storage, so this should not impact our vSphere environment. From your experience, is this a safe operation, or should we plan an outage window for our vSphere datastore?

Thanks.

EWILTS_SAS

The remediation is to upgrade ONTAP.  This is a relatively routine operation you should become comfortable doing as part of a NetApp storage administrator role.

If your NetApp cluster is properly configured, this is a non-disruptive operation that you can do during the middle of the business day if you so choose. 

You should run the Upgrade Advisor on NetApp's web site and it will spit out a nice PDF report telling you exactly what you need to do.  Make sure you read each and every warning and follow the steps as they're outlined.  Do not attempt to take shortcuts.