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Upgrade EV 8 to 11. How does storage know about the new LUN?

Thehound
Level 3

Hello,

I'm planning a project to upgrade an EV installation from 8 to 11. As there is no inplace upgrade available to do this the plan is to take it step by step, so go 8 to 9 then 10 and finally expecting to arrive at version 11 some months from now.

I've been reading the Symantec guides and quite a few forum posts about the various steps involved. Most of which isn't overly tricky, but I have a few areas I just don't quite understand.

Going from 8 to 9 is fine, it will be the same hardware with the same IP and hostnames, the attached storage won't change. So I "think" I understand this part. Most of this part of the plan came from this forum post https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/enterprise-vault-804-upgrade-version-904-caveats-and-...

Going from 9 to 10, this is where my understanding starts to fail. As this step requires 64 bit OS we would provision brand new servers and do a fresh install, we would then have a number of EV9 servers running and a number of EV10 servers on new hardware, new OS, new IP, new hostname. So what I don't understand is how storage would work at the point where the new EV10 servers go live.

I could simply attach the LUN to the new server, call it drive letter H (or whatever) and in Windows would then be able to browse to that drive and see all the Enterprise Vault archives and the individual DVS files. But how would EV know about them? Do I need to then update the SQL tables? My understanding was that SQL kept the record of where items are stored, so using the example of drive letter H what happens if on the old EV9 server it is presented as drive letter H and on the new EV10 server the same LUN is presented as drive letter Z.

Am I missing something quite fundamental or is there a step I need to take in order for EV10 to use the new storage? Update Indexes perhaps?

So as I say my understanding is that when an item is archived the physical location of that item is stored in SQL, and so you would have a record along the lines of "Item 1 = server\h$\enrterprisevaultstores\mailboxvs01\2014\03-19\c\002\C0028E6422B3891BAACF0DD77B1C3F71.DVS"

So when a user tries to retrieve that item a lookup occurs and SQL tells the Storage service where to locate the item, and can then find it and present it to the user.

But as these are attached LUNs and the drive letter could change, how does this work? I am hoping there is a nice answer and it is something I have missed, as if it involves updating the location of every item, well I can't see how that could work really. It could take months to update the many terabytes of EV data.

Can someone help me understand how this would work and/or what steps I would need to take in order to still access old items from the new servers.

 

Thanks very much,

 

Matt

 

 

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Patti_Rodgers
Level 4
Employee Accredited Certified

You've got it mostly right but a few tweaks... all of the servers in the same EV site must be running the same version, so when you build your new hardware, give the more modern OS but the currently installed version of EV.  So you will want to do your EV8-->9 upgrade first, then switch out the hardware, then do the remaining upgrades.

You will not have to mess with SQL if you use the Server Settings Migration Wizard:  https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.HOWTO42445.html

You're correct that you will leverage DNS in this process-- the alias is what ties everyting together-- and that if you take care to keep your drive letters consistent, then you can move the entire LUN from Old Server to New. The Server Settings Migration Wizard will even let you adjust those drive letters in a pinch, so if your old server had the indexes on P but you have to call that drive K on the new one, you can do it right in the GUI.

 

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2 REPLIES 2

Thehound
Level 3

OK been reading over the weekend and this appears to be handled by the DNS alias pointing to the new server - then just being very careful to apply the SAN volumes to the new server using the same drive letters.

So if the old server had the archive files living here

\\oldserver\h\enterprisevaultpartitions  where oldserver might be EV1.domain.com (10.0.0.9)

the new server could be EV2.domain.com (10.0.0.10) but has the DNS alias amended to that of the old server

then the DNS alias for the new server would cause it to look like this

\\oldserver\h\enterprisevaultpartitions (The same which is why this works)

 

The magic happens in DNS as now \\oldserver will be 10.0.0.10

So no updating of any data is required, just use DNS to cause the name to resolve to the new server, which as it then has the same file paths cause the query to work.

 

 

 

Seems simple enough, what could possibly go wrong?

 

 

Patti_Rodgers
Level 4
Employee Accredited Certified

You've got it mostly right but a few tweaks... all of the servers in the same EV site must be running the same version, so when you build your new hardware, give the more modern OS but the currently installed version of EV.  So you will want to do your EV8-->9 upgrade first, then switch out the hardware, then do the remaining upgrades.

You will not have to mess with SQL if you use the Server Settings Migration Wizard:  https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.HOWTO42445.html

You're correct that you will leverage DNS in this process-- the alias is what ties everyting together-- and that if you take care to keep your drive letters consistent, then you can move the entire LUN from Old Server to New. The Server Settings Migration Wizard will even let you adjust those drive letters in a pinch, so if your old server had the indexes on P but you have to call that drive K on the new one, you can do it right in the GUI.