topic ONTAP upgrade in ONTAP Discussions

ONTAP upgrade

AlexeyF — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:48:11 GMT

In the autogenerated procedure for ONTAP upgrade we can read:

"Delete any running or queued aggregate, volume, or Snapshot copy jobs"

does it concern the "reaper" jobs taht I see in the list?

11 Scheduled NDMP XBRE Context Reaper
CLUSTER02
- Queued

27 Vol Reaper CLUSTER02
- Queued
Description: Vol Reaper Job

23 Vvol 2.0 cleanup reaper
CLUSTER02
- Queued
Description: Vvol Cleanup Job

Re: ONTAP upgrade

Ontapforrum — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 15:28:44 GMT

According to this kb below. Deleting vol reaper jobs does not affect ONTAP upgrade.

KB:
https://kb.netapp.com/onprem/ontap/os/What_does_vol_reaper_job_means%3F

Re: ONTAP upgrade

Ayue — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 21:29:41 GMT

Check with Netapp support, all these reaper jobs are default jobs.

They will not impact the upgrade and will be restarted after upgrade completion .

Cheers.

Re: ONTAP upgrade

AlexeyF — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 08:24:29 GMT

Yes, that will not affect ONTAP upgrade, the question is if it will affect something else 🙂

Re: ONTAP upgrade

Ontapforrum — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 08:47:50 GMT

Could you be specific, what something else is your concerned ?

Re: ONTAP upgrade

AlexeyF — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 09:13:19 GMT

regarding the volume reaper jobs, accordig to the description "The vol reaper (Mhost reaper) has to run to clean up the volumes that are still present in the volume recovery queue." I would be concerned if those cleanup jobs will not be impacted after the upgrade is done.

I've not found what NDMP XBRE Context Reaper job does but the concern is the same. Will this functionality remain maintened after the upgrade?

Or I shouldn't worry because after the node reboot all the required jobs will be returned to the queue?

thanks

Re: ONTAP upgrade

Ontapforrum — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:14:18 GMT

Ok.

As far as vol reaper is concerned, you can check the current status, to check if there is anything pending in the queue. There is a default retention time, so once that is passed, it will be re-attempted, I think these are scheduled internal jobs of ONTAP. However, open a ticket to support, to be 100% sure. It will not stop you from upgrade, as we understood.

Coming to NDMP reaper context: That suggests, there are backups in your environment involving NDMP Protocol? Is that correct ? I found this kb, that explains the reason. Please check which version of ONTAP you are running, in the bug-report.

https://kb.netapp.com/onprem/ontap/os/The_upgrade_aborted_on_task_%22NDMP_rbe_context_reaper_9.8_Upgrade_Revert_Task%22

https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/bugs-online/product/ONTAP/BURT/1386268
If your ONTAP is among the Fixed In Versions, then no action needed.

Basically, NDMP 4.0 (extensions) has restartable_context feature, that allows NDMP backups to be restared from the check_point, however, it's the job of the DMA to delete the context for the given job that has completed successfully. Sometime, DMA fails to delete the context, and they keep accumulating, until it is unsafe for the upgrade.

You can check the queue:
::> vserver services ndmp restartable-backup show
false: the context has not been deleted by the backup application
true: the context is in progress to be deleted by the backup application

Delete restartable contexts:
https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap/tape-backup/delete-restartable-contexts-task.html

Best advise: reach out to NetApp support, so that they can also review your query and you could refer the support ticket, in case you bump into any issue during upgrade.