System upgrades

[chenguanghui]

Hi:

   I'm going to upgrade the storage system version from 9.5 to 9.13.1 in one day, what to be aware of and what are the risks

Thanks

[TMACMD]

Make sure your platform support the latest code. If you are on 9.5 right now, you may not be able to go past 9.8 on certain platforms and 9.11 on other platforms. If you try to load unsupported code, bad things may happen!

starting at 9.5 definitely start with the latest 9.5P19 release. Then jump to 9.7P23 -> 9.9.1P20 -9.13.1P11.

For some versions ONTAP will let you apply two upgrades, but I have found it safer to just process one upgrade at a time and wait for it to finish.

WIth doing SO MANY updates, I like to go to th cluster command line:

set diag 

system node upgrade-revert show

cluster show

storage failover show

I run those after every upgrade to be sure all nodes are good before starting the next.

[ChLokesh]

Hello Chenguanghui,

1. NetApp Upgrade Advisor: The first thing I would recommend is to go to the NetApp Upgrade Advisor in Active IQ to generate an upgrade plan.
2. Review Release Notes: Check the release notes for the new version to understand new features, bug fixes, and potential breaking changes.
3. Check Compatibility: Ensure that your current environment and any integrations are compatible with the new version.
4. Test Environment: Set up a test environment to run the upgrade process and identify any issues.
5. Prepare Rollback Plan: Have a rollback plan in case the upgrade encounters significant issues.
6. Plan Downtime: Schedule the upgrade during a maintenance window if required to minimize impact.
7. Configuration checks: Do prechecks and posts checks to before and after the upgrade.

Following these steps can help ensure a successful ONTAP upgrade.

[TMACMD]

I will put it again here:

Make sure your platform support the latest code. If you are on 9.5 right now, you may not be able to go past 9.8 on certain platforms and 9.11 on other platforms. If you try to load unsupported code, bad things may happen!

Not every customer has the hardware inventory to build a test environment. After the upgrade, find a way to make it work. The "rollback" indicated above is a 100% outage to allow ONTAP to revert structures without any client access. Not fun. 

[Amador · Accepted solution]

All the information needed at ONTAP upgrade overview (netapp.com)

[chris_hurley]

The only platforms that support both 9.5 and 9.13.1 are the following:

A800

FAS9000

FAS8200

FAS2720

FAS2750

If your system is not one of those listed above, it will not support this upgrade.