Estimating the time to complete an upgrade

When planning an upgrade to StorageGRID 11.4, 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 11.3 to 11.4 does not require a Cassandra database upgrade; however, the Cassandra service will be stopped and restarted on each Storage Node. For future 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	The upgrade is not yet running. As required, you can perform this step before the scheduled upgrade maintenance window.
Primary Admin Node upgrade	The primary Admin Node is stopped, upgraded, and restarted.	30 minutes	You cannot access the primary Admin Node.
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.	15 to 45 minutes per node, with appliance Storage Nodes requiring the most time	Do not change the grid configuration. Do not change the audit level configuration. Do not update the ILM configuration. Performing other maintenance procedures, including decommissioning and expansion, is not supported. If you need to perform a recovery procedure, contact technical support.
Cassandra database update	Storage Nodes only. The upgrade process stops the Cassandra service, checks each node to verify that the Cassandra database does not need to be updated, and restarts the service.	3 minutes for each Storage Node
Restart services	Some grid node services are restarted. Affected grid nodes might be shown as Administratively Down.	15 minutes per node
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.

Procedure

Multiply the number of nodes in your StorageGRID system by 45 minutes/node (average).
Multiply the number of Storage Nodes by 3 minutes for the Cassandra upgrade step, and add this number to the total.
Add 1 hour to this time to account for the time required to download the .upgrade file, upgrade the primary Admin Node, and complete the final steps.

Example: Estimating the time to upgrade from StorageGRID 11.3 to 11.4

Suppose your system has 14 grid nodes, including 9 Storage Nodes. The estimated time to upgrade all nodes is 12 hours.

  630 minutes (14 × 45 minutes/node)
 + 27 minutes (9 × 3 minutes/Storage Node)
 + 60 minutes (Admin Node and final steps)
-----------------------------------------
  717 minutes (~12 hours)