Upgrading to a New Version of the Delphix Engine
System Administration / System Installation, Configuration, and Management / Upgrading the Delphix Engine / Upgrading to a New Version of the Delphix Engine

This topic describes how to upgrade to a new version of the Delphix Engine.


Upgrades of the Delphix Engine are performed with the assistance of Delphix support. In preparation for such upgrades, you must open a support case and plan the upgrade with the assistance of a support engineer. The support engineer will be responsible for performing the upgrade procedure

Prerequisites

During the upgrade, VDBs will be inaccessible, and only system administrator users will be able to login to the Delphix Engine. The upgrade will automatically log out any users who are logged in at the time and will prevent new users from logging in.

Uploading an Upgrade Version

Before you can upgrade a Delphix Engine, you must upload to the engine an upgrade file for the version to which you want to upgrade. Upgrade files are available on the Delphix download site. The procedure for uploading an upgrade version to the Delphix Engine is:

  1. Download an upgrade version from the Delphix download site to a directory that is visible from the host running the web browser.
  2. Login to the Server Setup application.
  3. In the System Upgrade Management panel, click View.
  4. Click the up arrow to upload a new version.
  5. A file dialog will popup. Select the upgrade version you downloaded from the download site.

Once the file has been uploaded to the Delphix Engine, it will be unpacked in the background and ultimately displayed in the list of versions on the left-hand side of the System Upgrade Management screen.

Scheduling VDB Downtime

If a new version of the operating system is included in the new Delphix version, then your Delphix Engine will automatically disable all VDBs and dSources during the upgrade process in order to safely reboot to the new version. This will only happen if a new version of the OS is being installed. To determine if an upgrade will result in a reboot and VDB downtime, compare the OS version in the currently-running Delphix version with the OS version in the newly-uploaded Delphix version to which you will be upgrading. The OS version is included in the version details displayed in the System Setup application's System Upgrade Management screen.

If the OS will not be updated as part of the upgrade, then the upgrade process will have no impact on the availability of VDBs, and you do not need to schedule any downtime for your VDB applications.

If the OS will be updated as part of the upgrade, then you should schedule appropriate downtime for your VDB applications. The Delphix Engine will automatically disable VDBs and dSources during upgrade. The length of downtime will be proportional to the number of VDBs.

Long running jobs including replication and snapsync will fail during any upgrade.

The Delphix Engine provides a feature that allows you to verify, or validate, an upgrade before applying it. The verification does a dry run of some of the upgrade procedures in order to alert the administrator of potential problems before continuing with the upgrade. It is strongly recommended that you perform this verification a day or two in advance before your upgrade downtime begins in order to give yourself time to address any problems flagged by the verification.

The procedure for verifying an upgrade is:

  1. Login to the Server Setup application.
  2. In the System Upgrade Management panel, click View.
  3. On the left-hand side, select the version to which you will be upgrading. Details on the version will be displayed on the right.
  4. Below the version details, click Verify Upgrade.

Verification will be run in the background. You can view the progress of the verification in the Action sidebar.

Upgrade Procedure

Once you have uploaded an upgrade version, optionally verified the upgrade, and optionally scheduled downtime for VDBs, you can apply the upgrade.

  1. Login to the Server Setup application.
  2. In the System Upgrade Management panel, click View.
  3. On the left-hand side, select the version to which you will be upgrading.
  4. Click Apply Upgrade to initiate the upgrade process.

The upgrade will run in the background. You can view the progress of the upgrade in the Action sidebar.

Deferred OS Upgrade

Each Delphix Engine upgrade image contains both Delphix management software and software for DelphixOS, the operating system that runs Delphix. DelphixOS is versioned, and the OS version that is delivered with any given Delphix Engine version is displayed as osVersion in the version properties. By default, when you apply a new version, if that version delivers a newer OS than what is currently running, the system will reboot to the new OS as part of the upgrade process. This requires scheduling downtime for VDBs, because VDBs are disabled during upgrade.

In some cases, it may be possible to defer upgrading DelphixOS even when a new version is included in the upgrade image. You can determine if this is possible by comparing the minOsVersion property of the new version with the osVersion that is currently running. For example:

delphix system version> list
NAME 		STATUS 				OSRUNNING 		BUILDDATE
4.0.6.0 	UPLOADED 			false 			2014-06-17T03:12:48.000Z
4.0.5.0 	CURRENTLY_RUNNING 	true 			2014-06-10T14:41:28.000Z

Here, the running OS comes from version 4.0.5.0. You want to see if the OS version in 4.0.5.0 meets the minimum requirements for version 4.0.6.0, to which you are upgrading:

delphix system version> select 4.0.5.0 get osVersion
4.0.2014.06.07
delphix system version> select 4.0.6.0 get osVersion
4.0.2014.07.01
delphix system version> select 4.0.6.0 get minOsVersion
4.0.2014.04.24

In this example, although 4.0.6.0 includes a newer version of DelphixOS than what is currently running, the currently-running OS meets its minimum OS version requirement. Consequently, you can choose to defer upgrading DelphixOS when upgrading from 4.0.5.0 to 4.0.6.0 by setting the defer property in the apply context.

In general, you can defer upgrading DelphixOS when the currently-running OS version is greater than or equal to the minimum OS version requirements of the version to which you are upgrading. When you perform a deferred OS upgrade, the OS version will still be installed, but the system will not reboot to that new version. The Delphix Engine will still restart to the new version, but this restart will not result in downtime for VDBs. After that point, the STATUS column of the running version will show DEFERRED instead of CURRENTLY_RUNNING. This indicates that although this version is running, the OS upgrade was deferred.

Later, you can update the OS to the current version by applying the running version again and not setting the defer property. When you do this, the system will reboot to the current version of DelphixOS. This will result in downtime for your VDBs.

Contact Delphix support to determine whether a deferred OS upgrade is appropriate for your Delphix Engine. You should be aware of what changes are included in the new OS version before making this determination.