Cybersecurity
DevOps Cloud
IT Operations Cloud
FYI: These steps can also be used when upgrading any major Filr release (like Filr 2 to Filr 3, any upgrade requiring an appliance replacement, preserving the vastorage disk).
Additional Disclaimer: This is an untested by engineering and therefor unsupported procedure, so if the end-result is unexpected, use the documented and supported manner instead.
Although it is strongly recommended to remove the snapshots, as documented, several admins prefer to be save and want to have a snapshot (or several snapshots) before performing an upgrade or updated.
Even though you basically preserve the old VMs when upgrading to Filr 4, some are somewhat reluctant to remove their snapshots, or have a back-up solution based on snapshots.
On VMware ESX and ESXi you can circumvent this by using the command line interface (CLI) tools of the hypervisor and clone the disk in stead of copying it.
(Cloning the virtual disk (.vmdk) basically creates a new disk but with the contents of an existing .vmdk)
This is the only step that differs from the normal upgrade procedure as documented.
This would be the procedure to achieve this, if required:
These were the steps that differ from the normally documented upgrade procedure.
After this you can power on the appliances and perform the upgrade as per the regular documentation.
The main reason that the MySQL appliance is not upgraded in a large or expandable setup, but a new PostgreSQL appliance is deployed (with a different DNS name and IP) is that, as documented, after the upgrade of the Filr and Lucene appliance(s) and the post-upgrade tasks, the database is basically migrated over the wire by a Filr appliance from the MySQL appliance (or server) towards the PostgreSQL appliance (or server).
For performance reasons (and fault tolerance) it is still a recommendation to build a database environment on bare metal.
In VMWare, for performance reasons, it's recommended not to use "thin" disks, though in a LAB or TEST environment, where disk space is limited, it can be used.
* Adding the additional SCSI controllers and making sure that the system disk is SCSI0:0 VASTORAGE is SCSI1:0 and VAR is SCSI2:0 insures that the Linux OS uses the correct disk sequence / hierarchy. This means that trough out the life of the VM / is /dev/sda1, /vastorage is /dev/sdb1 and /var is /dev/sdc1 (even when they are added in a different sequence in the VM).
** for Filr 4, due to the new underlaying architecture, at the time of this writing, it's recommended to: