Upgrades

You can upgrade the system image and guest images for an entire cluster with a single action. The Central Management appliance orchestrates the upgrade to ensure that at least one broker and one compute node are running during the upgrade, so there is no interruption in service. (This assumes that you have more than one broker enabled.)

You can also upgrade a single node. This option allows you to upgrade a node that is connected to the Central Management appliance, but not currently part of a cluster.

Caution

Do not upgrade a single node that is currently part of a cluster. Upgrade the entire cluster from the Central Management appliance instead.

Note

In this document, a "full" upgrade means the operation upgrades both the system image and guest images.

The system image and guest images are cached on the Central Management appliance after the first download for any node. The Central Management appliance uses these images to update subsequent nodes, instead of downloading them again. This efficiency is realized whether you update the cluster or a single node.

The Central Management appliance provides warnings when nodes are not running the latest version of the Virtual Execution system image or the latest version of guest images. It also warns you when the nodes are not running the same version of guest images, which means you must upgrade one or more nodes to synchronize them.

The VX node hostname on the Central Management appliance must match the VX hostname on the Virtual Execution appliance. If they are different, the Central Management Web UI will prevent you from upgrading the cluster. You must change the hostnames to match before upgrading the cluster. When you create a cluster, ensure the Virtual

Execution hostname on the Virtual Execution appliance is same as the node hostname in the Central Management Web UI.

Upgrade messages are displayed in various areas of the Central Management Web UI, such as on the Clusters, Nodes, and Summary pages.

You can also use the show cmc IVX cluster detail command output to determine whether upgrades are available:

cm-hostname # show cmc mvx cluster detail
MVX Cluster: Cluster-Acme
Health OK: yes
...

Update Status:
Latest OS version installed    : no
GI update available            : no
...

You can perform the following upgrade operations from either the Central Management Web UI or CLI:

From the Central Management CLI, you can also delete downloaded guest images. For example, if the guest-images installation fails due to a bad download, you can delete the guest images to clean up the partial data. See Deleting a Guest-Images download.

Each upgrade operation follows a specific sequence of tasks. Status messages keep you informed about the progress of the upgrade as it moves through the tasks.

Note

You can use the show fenet update operations command to view the tasks for each operation. See Configuring and viewing upgrade settings.

Prerequisites