Isilon OneFS Upgrades Introduction

Introduction

This article will introduce EMC Remote Proactive Isilon teams working process and the upgrading for
Isilon OneFS.

Detailed Information

About Isilon OneFS:

EMC Isilon OneFS is the intelligence behind Isilon scale-out NAS solutions. OneFS combines the three
layers of traditional storage architectures file system, volume manager, and data protection into one
unified layer. Isilon OneFS, the latest generation of OneFS, provides increased flexibility and allows the
data lake to expand to the edge and cloud.

The figure below shows the different types of storage node performances and capacity differences:
Remote Proactive Isilon team responsibilities:

Remote Proactive Isilon team is providing the upgrades, preparation for upgrade, and maintenance for
Isilonproduct.

After receiving a service request submitted by the user, our engineers will contact the customer to
arrange the pre-check time, upgrade target version and pre-check connection type (upload log files,
ESRS or WebEx).

Then, the upgrade engineer will to do the pre-check for a specified array, in order to ensure compliance
with an array of upgrade requirements.

Upgrade engineer will provide the detailed upgrade schedule, thencontact the user to decide the upgrade
time and the relevant details.

Isilon upgrade process:

During upgrade day, the upgrade engineer will send a WebEx link to the customer.
The upgrade engineer will make the necessary health check before upgrading.
The upgrade time may be different depending on the upgrade type and the current workload.
After the upgrade has completed, the upgrade engineer will run a health check to ensure that the
array is working properly.

Isilon OneFS upgrade:

Isilon OneFS upgrades have two ways: rolling upgrade and offline upgrade. Rolling upgrade will
require more time than offline upgrade.
During an offline upgrade, it will restart all nodes at the same time, all client-side arrays cannot be
accessed during the restart process. So, it requires the customer to prepare for a downtime for
the upgrade.
During a rolling upgrade, it will restart one node at a time. After it has completed the upgrade for
one node and its back to the arrays, the next node will start to reboot. In a rolling upgrade, the
other node in the arrays is still accessible for clients, but all of the clients will be affected, and the
following may occur:

a. When the clients are connecting to other online nodes, there will be some delays.
b. SMB client does not automatically reconnect to the other online nodes, users need to
establish a connection manually.
c. If you already made the dynamic NFS client configuration according to best practices, during
the upgrade, the NFS client will automatically reconnect to the other online nodes. (For the
best practices, please refer to https://support.EMC.com/kb/457328)

For some OneFS versions, they do not support rolling upgrades. Our upgrade engineer will be able to
determine these during the pre-check process.