5.1 Guidelines for Upgrading

Use the guidelines in this section to upgrade clusters one peer cluster at a time.

5.1.1 Requirements

BCC 1.1 SP2 for NetWare requires that every node in each peer cluster be upgraded to NetWare 6.5 SP8 with the latest patches for NetWare and Novell Cluster Services. For information, see the following resources:

5.1.2 Performing a Rolling Cluster Upgrade

Performing a rolling upgrade of NetWare and applying the latest patches lets you keep your cluster up and running and lets your users continue to access the network while the upgrade is being performed.

For example, during a rolling cluster upgrade, one server is upgraded from NetWare SP6 to SP8 and the latest patches are applied while the other servers in the cluster continue running a previous support pack of NetWare 6.5. Then another server is upgraded and patched, and then another, until all servers in the cluster have been upgraded to NetWare 6.5 SP8 with the latest patches.

After upgrading NetWare and applying the latest patches, reboot the server to automatically load Cluster Services software.

During the upgrade process, cluster pools, volumes, and resources fail over from the server being upgraded to other servers in the cluster. After a cluster server is upgraded and brought back online, the pools, volumes, and resources that failed over to other servers in the cluster during the upgrade process fail back to the upgraded server.