Upgrade to 6.5?

[Tom_Burrell]

    Anyone out there upgraded to 6.5 yet?  I'm on 6.2.1, and looking to get going in a couple weeks on the upgrade- I'd like to hear about anyone's experiences to this point.

[skarve]

Hi,

   I have not upgraded but installed a new setup. It promises a lot and yes it does deliver as well. Especially the new feature of installing PureDisk as a storage server is faboulous.

Thanks

Sumeet.Karve

[Jim-m]

The new 6.5 version uses veritas volume manager rather than suse volume manager.  This complicates the upgrade.  I did new 6.5 install.  I don't know how fabulous this product is, but first impressions as WAN backup  tool is interesting. 

Bugs surfaced so far
* Exporting to NBU 6.5.1 on  Win 2003 X64 - is a a no go
* Using DNS on the SPA and exteranl AD/LDAP integration are mutually exclusive.
Probably more to come.

Getting reports out PD is painful  - resorted to a pdf converter that pretends to be a printer e.g. primopdf, this has its limitions as it only prints what you see.  There's a technote on this ...too labour intensive

[Tom_Burrell]

OK- I just completed the upgrade this weekend.  Here are my notes from the field:

1) It worked.  I had some glitches (self-inflicted- more on that later) but it worked.

2) Bring a good book- my Database was 170 GB, and the upgrade took 6.5 hours.

3) The Incredible Shrinking Database- my 170GB database dropped to 40 GB after the upgrade. Combination of re-writing the data (as part of the process) and improved efficiencies about how the data is stored.

4) Watch Your Typing!!! I decided that I did not want Puredisk to schedule all 37 client upgrades at once- because I'm paranoid that way.  I had some commands from Symantec to help me do this in smaller batches, but due to a typo on my part, one of the agent ID's got entered wrong.  That caused Very Bad Things.  The Data Selection tab disappeared, and all the options in the left hand pane of the Data Management tab went away too.  Correcting the typo fixed it, but it took a while to sort that out.

Lessons learned:

Next time I'll avoid the command line agent upgrades.  It's helpful for mass-disabling agents, but that's it.  Enabling each agent via the GUI triggered the agent upgrade just fine, and would have shaved 3 hours off my post-upgrade heart attack session.

Otherwise that's it.  Smooth as silk.  I've had a lot worse days.

Oh yeah- about that VVM stuff- not relevant for upgrades (changing from LVM to VVM is not supported), and our UNIX team felt that unless VCS was involved, there was no real advantage for one over the other.  Both are supported, so we'll stick with LVM for now just to be consitent across nodes


Message Edited by Tom Burrell on 06-09-2008 01:21 PM

[lee_foster1]

Hi

I am looking at an upgrade from PDOS 6.2.0.13 PUREDISK VERSION 6.2.0.7462 to version 6.5, Any comments on installation order/steps?

Thanks

[Tom_Burrell]

Here's my task list from the upgrade:

1) Shut down all running jobs

2) Shut down all remote agents
    /opt/pddb/bin/psql -U pddb ca -c "update agent set statustypeid = 1 where ostype between 10 and 12";
   

3) Add New License Keys

4) Upgrade PDOS
See Upgrade Instructions on P 157 of Storage Pool Guide
    run pre-upgrade script
    reboot (boot to CD)
    See P159 of Storage Pool Guide
    Run post upgrade script

5) Upgrade Puredisk application
    See P 161 of Storage Pool Guide
   
   
6a) Activate each agent in GUI to trigger automatic update. Run test backup/restore

Done

OR (if you did step 6a, DO NOT DO THE STEPS AFTER THIS POINT- YOU ARE DONE)

6b) Upgrade each agent manually
   

7) Change Puredisk internal version number for each agent as updated

    - To change one agent that happens to be agentid 41:
    /opt/pddb/bin/psql -U pddb ca -c "UPDATE agent SET version = '6.5.0.10534' where id = 41;"
   
    - To change all the Windows clients agent version:
    /opt/pddb/bin/psql -U pddb ca -c "UPDATE agent SET version = '6.5.0.10534' where osversion between 10 and 12"; 
   


8) Activate agents and confirm success with test backup/restore
   
    - Activate the clients as needed or to activate them all, run:
    /opt/pddb/bin/psql -U pddb ca -c "update agent set statustypeid = 2 where osversion between 10 and 12";

Done
   
   



Message Edited by Tom Burrell on 06-10-2008 10:10 AM