Upgrade Process

[p4ck3tl055]

I've currently got two FreeNAS 9.2.1.9 boxes running in production. Due to circumstances beyond the scope of this discussion, I've not been able to keep them updated. But, before the end of the year, I'm going to be deploying new hardware for the servers tied to these boxes and want to use that opportunity to upgrade to the latest FreeNAS too.

The FreeNAS machines are Supwermicro bare bones systems that I built. They each have 32GB of RAM, Xeon E3-1230, 4x4TB drives in ZFS plus a 256GB SSD ZIL. Each machine has a 32GB USB3 flash drive which FreeNAS is loaded on. My configs are simple - each machine has two IP addresses, one data set and one NFS share. The FreeNAS systems hosts VMWare ESXi 6 datastores.

I think the proper procedure would be:

1). Backup up both the current running configs and the data on the storage drives (I do this one every 60 days anyway)
2). Upgrade FreeNAS from 9.2.1.9 --> 9.3.1
3). Reboot, confirm all is well.
4). Upgrade FreeNAS 9.3.1 --> 9.10.x
5). Reboot, confirm all is well.
6). Assuming all is well, take backup of FreeNAS current configs and place machines back in service.

(I would like to move from NFS to iSCSI during this upgrade, would that involve having to put back the data after the upgrade?)

The "upgrades" would use "memory device" as shown in the upgrade videos on Youtube.

Everything looks good to me on paper, but I need a confirmation from someone more knowledgeable than me.

Then I need to know what's the worst thing that could happen and best resolution for it. (Loss of the FreeNAS install, reload???)

Thanks in advance.

 

[Chris Moore]

Sure, the worst thing that could possibly happen is that you have to completely reload the OS and restore the data from backup. I had to do that on a server recently and it is a pain, but if you have good documentation of your configuration, it can be done in a day or so. I had to copy back about 7 TB of data and that took a bit of time but it was a 10GB network link, so not as long as the last time I had to do it when I was using 1GB networking.

The likely situation is that you will have no problems. I have a server that has been incrementally upgraded and never missed a beat. Do take proper precautions but it should be no problem.