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Upgrading a Cluster

Simplyblock clusters consist of two independent parts: a control plane with management nodes, and a storage plane with storage nodes. A single control plane can be used to manage for multiple storage planes.

The control plane and storage planes can be updated independently. It is, however, not recommended to run an upgraded control plane without upgrading the storage planes.

Recommendation

If multiple storage planes are connected to a single control plane, it is recommended to upgrade the control plane first.

Upgrading the control plane and storage cluster is an online operation and does not require downtime. Planning an upgrade as part of a maintenance window is recommended, though.

Upgrading the CLI

Before starting a cluster upgrade, all storage and control plane nodes must update the CLI (sbctl).

This can be achieved using the same command used during the intial installation. It is important, though, to provide the --upgrade parameter to pip to ensure an upgrade to happen.

sudo pip install sbctl --upgrade

Upgrading a Control Plane

This section outlines the process of upgrading the control plane. An upgrade introduces new versions of the management and monitoring services.

To upgrade a control plane, the following command must be executed:

sudo sbctl cluster update <CLUSTER_ID> --cp-only=true --restart=true

After issuing the command, the individual management services will be upgraded and restarted on all management nodes.

Upgrading a Storage Plane

Now to upgrade the storage plane, the following steps are performed for each of the storage nodes. From the control plane, issue the following commands.

Warning

Ensure not all storage nodes are offline at the same time. Storage nodes must be updated in a round-robin fashion. In between, it is important to wait until the cluster has stabilized again and potential rebalancing operations have finished before starting to upgrade the next storage node.

sudo sbctl storage-node suspend <NODE_ID>
sudo sbctl storage-node shutdown <NODE_ID>

If the shutdown doesn't work by itself, you may savely force a shutdown using the --force parameter.

sudo sbctl storage-node shutdown <NODE_ID> --force

Ensure the node has become offline before continuing.

sudo sbctl storage-node list

Next up, on the storage node itself, a redployment must be executed. To achieve that, ssh into the storage node and run the following command.

sudo sbctl storage-node deploy [--isolate-cores] --if-name <IFNAME>

Finally, the new storage node deployment can be restarted from the control plane.

sudo sbctl storage-node restart <NODE-ID>

Once the node is restarted, wait until the cluster is stabilized. Depending on the capacity of a storage node, this can take a few minutes. The status of the cluster can be checked via the cluster listing.

sudo sbctl cluster list