Migrating from 8.1.4 to 8.2.5

[Digriz60]

Hello,

I've been reading through all the documentation, including Update Advisor, regarding upgrade from 8.1 family to 8.2. Management would like this done by the end of the year, so initially I was going to update to the lates p10 for 8.1. After reading everything, it seems 8.2.3(or 5) is really the only way to go, 8.1 is old and no longer supported.

While the documentation is pretty comprehensive, I just wanted to throw this question out to the people in the trenches and ask what 'Gotchas' I might anticipate. From what I've read, it is much more involved that staying in the same revision family, and my plan was to update the Management software (SnapManager, SnapDrive, etc) much earlier, as well as any firmware, to break up the migration in to digestible steps. I believe we can't do nondisruptive update, as we run CIFS for our drive shares. Is this assumption correct?

Any thoughts on your experience is greatly appreciated!

[TMADOCTHOMAS · Accepted solution]

Hi Digriz60,

You might want to consider 8.2.4 P6 instead, especially if you need to do this by 12/31, simply because there's a known bug people are running into on 8.2.5 (see below):

http://community.netapp.com/t5/Microsoft-Cloud-and-Virtualization-Discussions/Invoke-NaSsh-not-working-anymore-with-DOT-8-2-5-7-mode/td-p/133511

There should be a P1 release for 8.2.5 at some point but it may not be available by 12/31.

CIFS is the only outage you should experience (unless you do CIFS via Hyper-V in which case there's no outage). Your plan sounds about right - upgrade software to the compatibile version first, then upgrade the OS.

[Digriz60]

Thank you for the suggestion and answering my posts (all three!) I'll take your advice and go with the 8.2.4P6.

[aborzenkov]

Is unit still covered by NetApp support? 8.2 changed to node locked license. It gets converted when you update from 8.1; but if you ever need to re-initialize node or change motherboard you will need new, 8.2, node-specific license and this requires valid support.

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

No problem Digriz60! Glad to help.

aborzenkov, great point I forgot about.

[Digriz60]

Yeah, we just renewed our support contract, but I read that. Licenses are 28 characters now. I think I'm supposed to replace all the licenses at some point.