Unable to set maintenance window for upgrades,please help

Pkjnetapp — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 21:25:20 GMT

10 node AFF Netapp cluster nodes highly utilized and unable to set maintenance window

Hi friends,
Need your valuable suggestion as always.
I have a 10 node cluster which is highly utilized all times. Among those 2 nodes are hitting 80% on regular basis. As this a critical cluster I am unable to set a maintenance window for ONTAP upgrade. Vol move activity are not possible at the moment as need to upgrade cluster by next week. Any valuable suggestions please let me how to proceed with maintenance window. Is there any critical parameter like IOPs, latency which I can look into for performance and decide to set maintenance window. It should be non disruptive upgrade and Host team should not have any downtime during the activity. ONTAP Version upgrade planned from 9.11.1p8 to 9.11.1p16 to 9.15.1p16,it is a multi hop upgrade.

Re: Unable to set maintenance window for upgrades,please help

FelixZhou — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:12:39 GMT

Believe NetApp is always configured with HA pair with at least two nodes for both CIFS and blocks.

when you need to upgrade on one node and reboot it, both CIFS and blocks will be fail over to second node as redundancy. A brief interruptions may occur during failover.

topic Re: Unable to set maintenance window for upgrades,please help in General Discussion

Unable to set maintenance window for upgrades,please help

Re: Unable to set maintenance window for upgrades,please help