Chapter 6. Upgrading to Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 1.1

Upgrading involves moving from one version of a product to a newer major release of the same product. This section shows you up to upgrade to Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 1.1 from version 1.0.

From a component standpoint, this involves:

  • upgrading the Hosted Engine virtual machine to version 4.1.8

  • updating the physical hosts to Red Hat Virtualization 4.1.8

    Updating the physical hosts includes an upgrade of Red Hat Gluster Storage from version 3.2 to version 3.3.1.

6.1. Major differences in Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 1.1

Be aware of the following differences between Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 1.1 and previous versions.

Changed shard-block-size parameter default value

The default value of the shard-block-size parameter is now 64MB, instead of the previous default value of 4MB. Existing volumes retain the previous value of 4MB when a deployment is upgraded from Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 1.0 to 1.1.

There is no safe way to modify the shard-block-size value on volumes that contain data. Because shard block size applies only to writes that occur after the value is set, attempting to change the value on a volume that contains data results in a mixed shard block size, which results in poor performance.

Customers upgrading from Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 1.0 who want to use the new shard block size of 64MB can follow the steps in Section 5.1, “Improving volume performance by changing shard size” to create a new volume, migrate data to the new volume, and then change the block size on the original volume when all data has been removed.

6.2. Upgrade workflow

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is a software solution comprised of several different components. Upgrade the components in the following order to minimize disruption to your deployment.

  1. Hosted Engine virtual machine
  2. Physical hosts

6.3. Preparing to upgrade

  • Ensure that your Hosted Engine virtual machine is subscribed to the following repositories. 

    # subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-rhv-4.1-rpms
# subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-rhv-4-tools-rpms
# subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-rpms
# subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-supplementary-rpms
# subscription-manager repos --enable=jb-eap-7-for-rhel-7-server-rpms

  • Ensure that all physical machines are subscribed to the rhel-7-server-rhvh-4-rpms repository. 

    # subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-rhvh-4-rpms

  • If geo-replication is configured, ensure that data is not being synchronized.

    1. Check the Tasks subtab and ensure that there are no ongoing tasks related to Data Synchronization. If data synchronization tasks are present, wait until they are complete before beginning the update.

    2. Stop all geo-replication sessions so that synchronization will not occur during the update. Click the Geo-replication subtab and select the session that you want to stop, then click Stop.

      Alternatively, run the following command to stop a geo-replication session. 

      # gluster volume geo-replication MASTER_VOL SLAVE_HOST::SLAVE_VOL stop

6.4. Upgrading Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

6.4.1. Upgrading the Hosted Engine virtual machine

Follow the steps in the following section of the Red Hat Virtualization Self-Hosted Engine Guide to upgrade the Hosted Engine virtual machine: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_virtualization/4.1/single/self-hosted_engine_guide/#Upgrading_the_Self-Hosted_Engine.

6.4.2. Upgrading the physical hosts

Follow the steps in the sections linked below to upgrade the physical hosts one at a time.

Between upgrades, ensure that you wait for any heal operations to complete before upgrading the next host. You can view heal status in the Bricks subtab. Alternatively, run the following command for every volume, and ensure that Number of entries: 0 is displayed for each brick before upgrading the next host. 

# gluster volume heal VOLNAME info

Most upgrades can be applied using Red Hat Virtualization Manager. Follow the steps in the following section of the Red Hat Virtualization Upgrade Guide to update the physical host machines one at a time: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_virtualization/4.1/html/upgrade_guide/updating_virtualization_hosts.

If you need to apply a security fix, apply upgrades manually instead. Follow the steps in the following section of the Red Hat Virtualization Upgrade Guide: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_virtualization/4.1/html/upgrade_guide/Manually_Updating_Virtualization_Hosts

Important

When you set a gluster server into maintenance mode, ensure that you check the Stop Gluster service checkbox.

Important

Remember to move your hosts out of maintenance mode when their updates have been applied by running the following command: 

# hosted-engine --set-maintenance --mode=none