Upgrade MC/ServiceGuard version from A.11.09 to A.11.12

[Kenneth Yap]

Dear Experts,
I have a MC/ServiceGuard version a.11.09 two nodes cluster running. I need to upgrade to version a.11.12. to supporting the ServiceGuard Manager ver.a.10.01.
How I can upgrade the MC/ServiceGuard ?
Do I need to remove the old version of the MC/ServiceGuard ?

[Rainer von Bongartz · Accepted solution]

You can do a 'rolling upgrade', which means you can update your boxes without stopping the cluster.

A good documentation can be found on this link.

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/B3936-90045/B3936-90045_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/B3936-90045/00/00/31-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/B3936-90045/00/00/31-toc.html&searchterms=MC%7cService%7cGuard&queryid=20010718-230505

[whiteknight]

ServiceGuard has been revised several times over the years to add in new features. The designers of the product did not give ServiceGuard the ability to add a host to a current cluster that was not at the same revision of ServiceGuard as the existing
members. The only time a cluster can have hosts at different versions of ServiceGuard is during a "rolling upgrade", a process described in Appendix E of the "Managing MC/ServiceGuard"

manual - available at:
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/ha/

The rolling upgrade begins with all hosts at the same release of the O/S and same revision of MC/ServiceGuard. The system administrator then selects a host to upgrade, move it's
ServiceGuard packages to other hosts to run, and upgrades the target host to a new version of ServiceGuard or even a new release of HP-UX en route to a new version of ServiceGuard. ServiceGuard is able to allow mixed-version of ServiceGuard to run in a cluster, and even run packages (if compatible with the software).
ServiceGuard will not allow modifications to the cluster membership, or parameters during a mixed-version operation.

[Carsten Krege]

I agree with Rainer. The appendix of the SG manual (use the latest one!) gives instructions how a rolling update should be performed.

However, I doubt that it is worth to perform an update of a productive SG 11.09 cluster to version SG 11.12 for this for two reasons:

- SGMgr doesn't offer many features yet. This will change with the next release, when you can do several admin tasks, too (planned with the next application cd targeted for September).
- SG 11.12 is a minor release, whereas SG 11.13 will most likely a platform release (for the concept of platform release, feature release etc, refer to the SG 11.12 RelNotes on docs.hp.com). This means that SG 11.12 won't be patched after SG 11.13 has been released, whereas SG 11.13 will probably patched for 18 months (if it indeed becomes a platform release). The conclusion is that you might need to update to SG 11.13 once you want to apply a patch for a SG 11.12 cluster.
SG 11.13 is also planned for the next application release in September.

Summary: Wait until the next application cd is released and install SG 11.13 and SGMgr then.

Carsten