Estimating the time to complete an upgrade

When planning an upgrade to StorageGRID 11.2, you must consider when to upgrade, based on how long the upgrade might take. You must also be aware of which operations you can and cannot perform during each stage of the upgrade.

About this task

The time required to complete a StorageGRID upgrade depends on a variety of factors such as client load and hardware performance.

The table summarizes the main upgrade stages and lists the approximate time required for each stage. The steps after the table provide instructions you can use to estimate the upgrade time for your system.

Note: The upgrade from StorageGRID 11.1.x to 11.2 (or from 11.2.x to 11.2.y) does not require a Cassandra upgrade. For other StorageGRID feature releases, the Cassandra database update step might take several days or weeks, based on the amount of metadata in your system.

Upgrade stage	Description	Approximate time required	During this stage
Pre-upgrade validation	The grid’s condition is validated.	3 minutes per grid node, unless validation errors are reported	Do not change the grid configuration. Do not change the audit level configuration. Do not update the ILM configuration. Do not perform other maintenance procedures such as decommissioning, expansion, or recovery. You cannot access the primary Admin Node while that node is being upgraded.
Primary Admin Node upgrade	The primary Admin Node is stopped, upgraded, and restarted.	30 minutes
Upgrade of all other grid nodes	The software on all other grid nodes is upgraded, in the order in which you approve the nodes. Every node in your system will be brought down one at a time for several minutes each during the upgrade.	15 to 45 minutes per node, with appliance Storage Nodes requiring the most time Note: For upgrades to 11.2, Storage Nodes wait up to 10 minutes for active HTTP operations to be completed. For upgrades from 11.2, Storage Nodes wait only 2 minutes.
Cassandra database update	The upgrade process checks each node to verify that the Cassandra database does not need to be updated.	10 seconds per node or a few minutes for the entire grid
Restart services	Some grid node services are restarted.	15 minutes per node	Affected grid nodes might be shown as Administratively Down.
Complete final steps	The upgrade to the new release completes.	5 minutes	When the final upgrade steps complete, you can: Enable or disable new features. Change the grid configuration. Change the audit level configuration. Update the ILM configuration. Perform decommissioning, expansion, and recovery procedures.

Steps

Multiply the number of nodes in your StorageGRID system by 30 minutes/node (average).
Add 1 hour to this time to account for the time required to download the .upgrade file, run precheck validations, validate that no Cassandra update is required, and complete the final steps.

Example: Estimating the time to upgrade from 11.1 to 11.2

Suppose your system has 14 grid nodes. You would multiply 14 by 30 minutes/node and add 1 hour. The estimated time to upgrade all nodes is 8 hours.