QuantaStor Upgrade Guide
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 relatively simple and amounts to running 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.
On occasion we'll update the QuantaStor configuration file /etc/quantastor.conf and 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 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. Why? Well, for default settings that are not in the quantastor.conf file the service will automatically use it's stored defaults which are fine for 99% of all configurations. The one exception that comes to mind 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.
In 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 qstortarget
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.
