[Lustre-discuss] lustre upgrade 1.8.7 to 2.X advice

[Mohr Jr, Richard Frank (Rick Mohr)]

We just did an upgrade from Lustre 1.8.8 to 2.4.3 on our servers.  We used the standard 2.4.3 rpms except that we also added a patch for LU-4708.  Depending upon the size of your file system, you may want to include some other patches (like LU-4008).  We will probably upgrade our servers to Lustre 2.5 in the near future, but for the moment, we still have Lustre 1.8 clients and were concerned about compatibility issues.  (It was my impression that Lustre 2.4 was explicitly tested for compatibility with Lustre 1.8 clients, and although lustre 2.5 should also be compatible, there was not any extensive testing done.  It's possible that I might be mistaken about that.)  Right now, a lot of our clients are running lustre 1.8.9-wc, but we have a few running 1.8.6 and 2.4.3.  So far, we have not seen any compatibility issues.  We will likely upgrade all the clients to 2.4/2.5 in the next few months.

The section in the lustre manual about upgrading file systems was very helpful, and for the most part, the upgrade was pretty smooth.  You will need to pay special attention to quotas if you had them enabled, and during the upgrade, the conversion of the quota files can take quite a while.  We ran into one issue that prevented us from initially mounting the MDT after the upgrade, but this was resolved by mounting the MDT as ldiskfs and removing the CATALOGS file.  We have not run lfsck to enable the FID-in-dirent for all the files created under lustre 1.8 (since this would have prevented us from downgrading if we ran into major problems), but at this point, I think we are comfortable enough with 2.4.3 that we will pull the trigger on that very soon.

-- 
Rick Mohr
Senior HPC System Administrator
National Institute for Computational Sciences
http://www.nics.tennessee.edu


On Jun 3, 2014, at 11:29 AM, Gretchen Zwart <zwart at astro.umass.edu>
 wrote:

> Hi,
> I am looking for advice on lustre upgrade paths. I do have backups but it would be time consuming to do a fresh install. I'm interested in stability, fewest upgrade gotchas and ease of install. I need to stick with Debian for clients, but could move to Centos 6.4 for servers. I'm fine with doing my own builds, but would also be happy to use available rpms (or debs if I could find them). I'm using infiniband (DDR) for most of the clients.
> 
> Current servers:
> Debian 6
> Lustre 1.8.7
> OFED 1.5.2
> Kernel SLES 11sp1
> 
> Current clients:
> Debian 6 and 7
> Lustre 1.8.7
> OFED 1.5.2
> Kernel SLES 11sp1
> 
> Thanks in advance for suggestions/opinions.
> Regards,
> Gretchen
> 
> 
> -- 
> Gretchen Zwart
> UMass Astronomy Dept. 619E Lederle
> 710 North Pleasant ST
> Amherst,MA 01003
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