How your system is affected during the upgrade

You must understand how your StorageGRID system will be affected during the upgrade.

StorageGRID upgrades are non-disruptive

The StorageGRID system can ingest and retrieve data from client applications throughout the upgrade process. Grid nodes are brought down one at a time during the upgrade, so there is not a time when all grid nodes are unavailable.

To allow for continued availability, you must ensure that objects are stored redundantly using the appropriate ILM policies. You must also ensure that all external S3 or Swift clients are configured to send requests to one of the following:

A StorageGRID endpoint configured as a high availability (HA) group
A high availability third-party load balancer
Multiple Gateway Nodes for each client
Multiple Storage Nodes for each client

Historical data removed for legacy attributes

When you upgrade to StorageGRID 11.4, the history for most legacy attributes is trimmed to 30 days. After you upgrade, StorageGRID will allow the attribute history to grow for up to three years. The exception to this is the history for node capacity attributes, S3 rate attributes, and ILM summary attributes, which is trimmed to three years when you upgrade, instead of 30 days.

If you need to retain a longer history for legacy attributes, you must perform either of the following tasks before you upgrade to StorageGRID 11.4:

Export the history of an individual attribute from the Grid Manager and save it as a .csv file (see Exporting text reports in the instructions for monitoring and troubleshooting StorageGRID).
Monitoring and troubleshooting StorageGRID
Copy the entire MySQL database to an external MySQL service. Contact technical support for assistance.

Alerts and alarms might be triggered

Alerts and alarms might be triggered when services start and stop and when the StorageGRID system is operating as a mixed-version environment (some grid nodes running an earlier version, while others have been upgraded to a later version). For example, you might see the Unable to communicate with node alert when services are stopped, or you might see the Cassandra communication error alert when some nodes have been upgraded to StorageGRID 11.4 but other nodes are still running StorageGRID 11.3.

In general, these alerts and alarms will clear when the upgrade completes.

After the upgrade completes, you can review any upgrade-related alerts by selecting Recently resolved alerts from the Grid Manager Dashboard.

Note: During the upgrade to StorageGRID 11.4, the ILM placement unachievable alert might be triggered when Storage Nodes are stopped. This alert might persist for 1 day after the upgrade is completed successfully.

Many emails are generated

When you upgrade grid nodes, a large number of alarm email notifications are generated when the node is stopped and restarted. To avoid excessive emails, you can use the Notification Suppress All check box (Configuration > Display Options) to disable alarm notifications before you starting the upgrade. You can re-enable alarm email notifications after the upgrade is completed.

Attention: Selecting the Notification Suppress All check box suppresses all alarm email notifications and event-triggered AutoSupport emails. However, selecting the check box does not suppress alert email notifications. Because the alert system is designed to be quieter than the alarm system, you should not receive many alert email notifications during an upgrade.

Configuration changes are restricted

While you are upgrading StorageGRID:

Do not make any grid configuration changes until the upgrade is complete.
Do not change the audit level configuration until the upgrade is complete.
Do not enable or disable any new features until the upgrade is complete.
Do not update the ILM configuration until the upgrade is complete. Otherwise, you might experience inconsistent and unexpected ILM behavior.