Difference between revisions of "QuantaStor Upgrade Guide"

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Upgrading QuantaStor to the latest version is made easy using the  
 
Upgrading QuantaStor to the latest version is made easy using the  
[[http://wiki.osnexus.com/mediawiki/index.php/Storage_System_Upgrade_Manager_Dialog Upgrade Manager]] that's integrated into the web management interface.  Alternatively you can use the following commands while logged into the system console account as qadmin:
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[http://wiki.osnexus.com/mediawiki/index.php/Storage_System_Upgrade_Manager_Dialog Upgrade Manager] that's integrated into the web management interface.  Alternatively you can use the following commands while logged into the system console account as qadmin:
  
 
<pre>
 
<pre>

Revision as of 15:43, 2 April 2012

QuantaStor is regularly evolving to make it more robust and better performing. As such we release minor updates to QuantaStor on a regular basis and you can view the News section or review the Change Log to get all the details about what has changed since the build that you're running.

Upgrading QuantaStor to the latest version is made easy using the Upgrade Manager that's integrated into the web management interface. Alternatively you can use the following commands while logged into the system console account as qadmin:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qstormanager qstorservice qstortarget

The first part of the update process 'apt-get update' tells the system to update it's information about what packages are available from the OS NEXUS package server (http://packages.osnexus.com/packages). The second part tells the system to install the latest versions of the qstormanager, qstorservice, and qstortarget packages.

Generally speaking, most of the time you'll only need to upgrade the first two packages as it's rare that we upgrade the iSCSI target driver. Since upgrading the iSCSI target driver can interrupt iSCSI access to your volumes we are taking a policy of noting in the ChangeLog which version releases have an update to the iSCSI target driver with an asterisk (*) so you know when upgrading it is recommended or required. Here's how to do the upgrade of just the service and management interface w/o the target driver:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qstormanager qstorservice


Important! After upgrading, be sure to restart any web browsers that were running the QuantaStor Manager web UI. If you don't restart the browser or hit the re-load page button you'll end up using the cached copy of the UI which may not be compatible with the new version of the service. So always hit that 'Reload current page' button after upgrading or restart the browser.

On occasion we'll update the QuantaStor configuration file /etc/quantastor.conf and in such cases you'll get a message from the installer asking whether or not it's OK to overwrite the installed file with the package maintainers configuration file. This is to prevent the installer from overwriting your custom changes to the /etc/quantastor.conf file. If you've made changes to the /etc/quantastor.conf file then choose 'N' otherwise choose 'Y'. If you haven't made any changes, then it doesn't really matter, either choice is fine. The service has default settings built-in so the quantastor.conf configuration file is not required. If the file is missing or a new configuration setting is missing the QuantaStor service automatically uses it's own stored default which is fine for 99% of all configurations. The one exception is the configuration file for the XenServer PV Virtual Appliance / VM. It requires that unidentifiable devices be usable, so it requires the 'allow_unident=1' setting which defaults to 'allow_unident=0'. So if you're upgrading a QuantaStor XenServer PV VM be sure to not overwrite the config file, and if you do, be sure to edit /etc/quantastor.conf to set the allow_unident configuration setting back to 1 otherwise your Physical Disks will not be discovered.

In very rare instances we make changes to our embedded Apache Tomcat server, and you can upgrade it like so:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qstortomcat

This will interrupt any active web management sessions you have running, so it's best to restart your browser.

Package Details

qstormanager

The qstormanager package contains the QuantaStor Manager web management interface and it depends on the qstortomcat package. It depends on qstortomcat as it contains a specially configured version of Apache Tomcat which is installed to /opt/osnexus/quantastor/tomcat. The QuantaStor Manager package brings the Java servlet backend component that runs under Apache Tomcat as well as all the front-end QuantaStor Manager JavaScript that runs in the browser.

qstorservice

The QuantaStor Service is the core or 'brain' of the storage system and it is packaged in the qstorservice package. It contains the service, database, and all the surrounding components that are required for the storage system to run. You can start and stop the QuantaStor service manually with these following commands respectively: sudo /etc/init.d/quantastor stop sudo /etc/init.d/quantastor start As part of the installation process the QuantaStor service is restarted and while it is starting up you will not have access to login to the storage system via the Web Management interface. After about 1 minute you'll be able to login again. Starting and stopping the QuantaStor service will in no way interrupt access to you iSCSI disks / storage volumes.

qstortarget

The QuantaStor iSCSI target is a customized version of the open source IET (iSCSI Enterprise Target) driver. If you upgrade the target mode driver you can get a momentary loss of iSCSI access to your targets and in some cases you may need to reboot the storage system. Fortunately we do not modify the qstortarget very often.