Globlal clusers

[Powell]

Dear all,

Planning a vcs 4.0 to 5.0 upgrade. Environment is a solaris single node global clusers. The approach i would like to take is to upgrade the primary site and run it from there for awhile before upgrading the secondary. Having 4.0 MP1 and 5.0 in the same cluster will be the case for few days till we see whether the upgrade is feasible and the resources are all doing good.Reason for the upgrade is that switchovers do not go well with the current version and symantec wants us to upgrade. 

Do you think it's a advisable to run the cluster like that?. Could it have it's 2 nodes running to different versions. Please share some thoughts.

Thanks for your time..

[TomerG]

Different versions of VCS software in the same cluster are unsupported. If you want to make absolutely sure you can contact support, but I'm fairly confident that's the case.

You need to upgrade them all, or none at all. Obviously you can make a snapshot of the server / backup before the upgrade in case of issues, and I would just look through forum posts to see if anyone else has had performance issues (I've heard of none between 4.x and 5.0) 

[Powell]

Tomer,

Thanks for the reply. Since it's a global cluser with one node on each side, would it be possible for me to run one side with a different version after removing the participating nodes from the main.cf?. I don't mind losing automatic failover/switchover in the process.

[TomerG]

From the documentation (specifically the section on Multi-cluster Configurations in the VCS Administrator's Guide): "The clusters must use the same version of VCS."

Having different VCS versions is unsupported since the WAC (i.e. WAN) heartbeat process get's upgraded and is not backwards compatible with previous versions of the WAC.

You are correct that you would have to disable global failover during your upgrade of one side. It would become a manual process. Personally, I'd shutdown the secondary site during the testing, then if the testing was successful, upgrade the secondary.

[Powell]

Thanks Tomer, BTW you are referring to a VCS administration guide. I have seen a user guide but not an administrator's guide. If you don't mind please let me know where to grab it.

[TomerG]

VCS for UNIX is here: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/overview.jsp?pid=15066

VCS for Windows is here: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/overview.jsp?pid=56805

You can click on the Documentation link there, not the easiest to navigate, but you will eventually find it.

Or you can find pages like this: http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/307436.htm

This one has all the documentation for SPARC Solaris for version 5.0 of Storage Foundation and VCS. 

And of course they are also in a Docs directory on the actual software DVD/CD as well. 

Message Edited by Tomer Gurantz on 09-16-2008 02:30 PM