[gpfsug-discuss] Upgrade with architecture change

[Sundermann, Jan Erik (SCC)]

Hi,

we are operating a small Spectrum Scale cluster with about 100 clients and 6 NSD servers. The cluster is FPO-enabled. For historical reasons the NSD servers are running on ppc64 while the clients are a mixture of ppc64le and x86_64 machines. Most machines are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 but we also have few machines running AIX.

At the moment we have installed Spectrum Scale version 4.1.1 but would like to do an upgrade to 4.2.3. In the course of the upgrade we would like to change the architecture of all NSD servers and reinstall them with ppc64le instead of ppc64. 

From what I’ve learned so far it should be possible to upgrade directly from 4.1.1 to 4.2.3. Before doing the upgrade we would like to ask for some advice on the best strategy. 

For the NSD servers, one by one, we are thinking about doing the following:

1) Disable auto recovery
2) Unmount GPFS file system
3) Suspend disks
4) Shutdown gpfs
5) Reboot and reinstall with changed architecture ppc64le
6) Install gpfs 4.2.3
7) Recover cluster config using mmsdrrestore
8) Resume and start disks
9) Reenable auto recovery

Can GPFS handle the change of the NSD server’s architecture and would it be fine to operate a mixture of different architectures for the NSD servers?


Thanks,
Jan Erik