HP Serviceguard Extension for RAC (SGeRAC) Example of Rolling Upgrade, Keeping Kernels Consistent

NOTE: It is optional to set this parameter to “1.” If you want the node to join the cluster at boot time, set this parameter to “1”, otherwise set it to “0.”

6.Restart the cluster on the upgraded node (if desired). You can do this in Serviceguard Manager, or from the command line, issue the Serviceguard cmrunnode command.

7.Start Oracle (Clusterware, RAC) software on the local node.

8.Repeat steps 1-7 on the other nodes, one node at a time until all nodes have been upgraded.

NOTE: Be sure to plan sufficient system capacity to allow moving the packages from node to node during the upgrade process, to maintain optimum performance.

If a cluster fails before the rolling upgrade is complete (perhaps because of a catastrophic power failure), the cluster could be restarted by entering the cmruncl command from a node that has been upgraded to the latest revision of the software.

NOTE: HP recommends you to upgrade the Oracle RAC software either before SG/SGeRAC rolling upgrade or after SG/SGeRAC rolling upgrade, if you are upgrading Oracle RAC software along with SG/SGeRAC.

Halt the SGeRAC toolkit packages before upgrading Oracle RAC. For more information on Oracle RAC software upgrade, see Oracle documentation.

Keeping Kernels Consistent

If you change kernel parameters or perform network tuning with ndd as part of doing a rolling upgrade, be sure to change the parameters to the same values on all nodes that can run the same packages in a failover scenario. The ndd command allows the examination and modification of several tunable parameters that affect networking operation and behavior.

Example of Rolling Upgrade

The following example shows a simple rolling upgrade on two nodes, each running standard Serviceguard and RAC instance packages, as shown in Figure 20. (This and the following figures show the starting point of the upgrade as SGeRAC A.11.15 for illustration only. A roll to SGeRAC version A.11.16 is shown.)

SGeRAC rolling upgrade requires the same operating system version on all nodes. However, during rolling upgrade the nodes can run on mixed version of HP-UX. The example assumes all nodes are running HP-UX 11i v2. For your systems, substitute the actual release numbers of your rolling upgrade path.

NOTE: While you are performing a rolling upgrade, warning messages may appear while the node is determining what version of software is running. This is a normal occurrence and not a cause for concern.

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