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Create an ONTAP upgrade plan

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It is a best practice to create an upgrade plan. If you have an active SupportEdge Services contract for Active IQ Digital Advisor, you can use Upgrade Advisor to generate an upgrade plan. Otherwise, you should create your own plan.

Plan your upgrade with Upgrade Advisor

The Upgrade Advisor service in Active IQ Digital Advisor provides intelligence that helps you plan your upgrade and minimizes uncertainty and risk.

Active IQ identifies issues in your environment that can be resolved by upgrading to a newer version of ONTAP. The Upgrade Advisor service helps you plan for a successful upgrade and provides a report of issues you might need to be aware of in the ONTAP version you're upgrading to.

Steps

  1. Launch Active IQ

  2. In Active IQ view any risks associated with your cluster and manually take corrective actions.

    Risks included in the SW Config Change, HW Config Change, and HW Replacement categories need to be resolved prior to performing an ONTAP upgrade.

  3. Review the recommended upgrade path and generate your upgrade plan.

How long will an ONTAP upgrade take?

You should plan for at least 30 minutes to complete preparatory steps for an ONTAP upgrade, 60 minutes to upgrade each HA pair, and at least 30 minutes to complete post-upgrade steps.

Note If you are using NetApp Encryption with an external key management server and the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP), you should expect the upgrade for each HA pair to be longer than one hour.

These upgrade duration guidelines are based on typical configurations and workloads. You can use these guidelines to estimate the time it will take to perform a nondisruptive upgrade in your environment. The actual duration of your upgrade process will depend on your individual environment and the number of nodes.