when you prepare for upgrade, either you or CE will run pre-upgrade script that will verify your NAS/backend configuration, determinate what needs to be fixed before the upgrade can be started. CE will determinate if Flare needs to be upgraded. Take a look at release notes for the DART version you want to upgrade to. If you can , upgrade to 5.6.x as there are so many new features. If you have active/standby setup of your datamovers, plan for two failover/failback activities. Even though EMC says it's all online, when i upgraded my NS80 ..it took 10 minutes for CIFS services to start so as far as my CIFS clients are concerned ..they got disconnected. So whenever i schedule DART upgrades i tell users to save their work and log-off their computer. NFS clients are more forgiving ..they will keep retrying to reconnect to NFS export until it comes back online.

DART code upgrades arent done by the customer, they are done by EMC or partner personal

before that the current config gets reviewed to determine what and how needs to be upgraded and the upgrade needs get approved by an internal process (CCA)

when that is done for your system you will get the specific recommendations from your EMC service contact

as part of that as a pre-upgrade health check skript is run to make sure your system is an a good state for a successful upgrade

so - get a service request going for your system and you'll get all the details

Rainer

Thanks for your inputs. I have a case opened with EMC and still waiting for someone to own the case.

As I need to get business downtime, could someone let me know how long would the NAS upgrade takes? How long will the file systems/CIFS shares be down?

Does the FS needs to be down during the whole change window or only when the Datamovers are rebooted? I really appreciate all your help.

when i upgraded my NS80 last summer (from 5.6.40 to 5.6.45) it took around 6 hours. It does not mean that CIFS/NFS was not available for 6 hours, just the whole process took that long. I have a couple hundred files systems/checkpoints on each datamover and have 2 active and 2 standby ones. In my case during datamover reboot CIFS services would take 10 minutes to come back online.  If you are going to upgrade from 5.5 to 5.6 ..EMC schedules that as an offline upgrade because all datamovers will reboot at the same time, there will be no failover/failback. So if you are going to go to 5.6 ..might as well schedule downtime for 6 hours or so.

It reallly really depends on your config (models, which firmware also needs to be updated), which releases are involved and how the upgrade is done

so you are not going to get a good answere here - you need to get that from the CE planning the upgrade

no - all of the data movers have to at least run the same major version

We are going from 5.5. to 5.6.46.4. If i understood correctly, out of family upgrade would require a reboot of all the datamovers at a time and failover won't work.

Would it be possible to upgrade NAS code on selected DataMovers with in a celerra?

Say we have Datamovers 2, 3, 4 & 5

5 being a standby.

Can we do the upgrade on only DataMover 3 & 5.

and do the upgrade on rest of them later?

https://powerlink.emc.com/nsepn/webapps/btg548664833igtcuup4826/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/Technical_Documentation/300-004-151_a18.pdf

Where can I go to find the release notes for NAS CODE upgrades?  5.6.47 to be exact.

Thanks.

DHoffman wrote: Where can I go to find the release notes for NAS CODE upgrades?  5.6.47 to be exact. Thanks.

Hi,

you can always find them on Powerlink in:

Home > Support > Technical  Documentation and Advisories > Hardware/Platforms  Documentation > Celerra  Network Server > Release Notes

Note that when you navigate to the docs you need to pick the second entry that says "Celerra Network Server" and not "Celerra File Server" (which is the ancient CFS platform)

One level up in the General Reference category you'll find the Documentation CD

regards

Rainer