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Upgrade plan… Will it work?

Digital999
Luminary

Upgrade plan… Will it work?

I currently have a ReadyNAS RN314 device.  Works OK and no known issues.

Going to replace some older drives in the RN314 (XRaid) configuration for increased capacity. 

Once those drives are up and operational the next step is to replace the RN314 with a RN526X00 system. 

Both systems will be at the same OS level. 

The plan is to remove the two drives from the RN314 and then put them into the RN526,

Will that work or will the process involve having to ‘build’ the new drives from scratch??

 

Any suggestions will be appreciated. 

Model: RN526X|ReadyNAS 526X – 6 Bays with up to 60TB total storage
Message 1 of 11
Marc_V
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?

@Digital999

 

Your plan is possible since they are both using OS6 FW. But if you are upgrading your disks capacity, instead of replacing your drives on the RN314, it would be better if you use it to setup the other NAS, Then backup the data from RN314 going to RN526X.

 

This way, you can still use your RN314 as is or re-initialize it using the old drives.

 

Always do full backup of data before doing anything that involves data or disks,

 

HTH

 

Regards

 

 

Message 2 of 11
Digital999
Luminary

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?

Thank you for your reply.

 

This plan is a prototype that will need to be excuted ofer 40 times at various locations in our network nationwide. 

 

The idea is to minimize the amount of elasped time.  I am told that to do a system to system backupwill involve almost 36 hours for 6 TB disk size.  Additionally we do not have 'extra' disks at each site for the suggested operation. 

 

It would be nice to hear from somebody who has tried this or knows with certainity it will or will not work.  If not then we will need a different plan. 

 

Others are solicited to offer their experience based views. 

 

 

Message 3 of 11
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?

I think you need to give more specifics of your intended operation, as migrating from the old to new NAS as @Marc_V suggests, requires no "extra" drives.  The old drives stay in the old NAS and the new are in the new.

 

How many drives are i your current 314 units?  Marc's reply that it will work assumes it's only the two you plan to replace tnen move.  But if that's the case, I don't know why you aren't expanding by just adding more drives.

 

FYI, two re-syncs with 6TB drives will also likely take more than 36 hours.  Both methods still allow you access to the NAS, though lilkely a bit slower.  So, I'm not sure why time is such an important factor.   The copy to a new NAS with new drives, however, reduces the chance of a second drive failure killing your volume, as can happen on a re-sync and expansion.

Message 4 of 11
StephenB
Guru

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?


@Digital999 wrote:

 

It would be nice to hear from somebody who has tried this or knows with certainity it will or will not work.  If not then we will need a different plan. 

 


As @Marc_V already told you, it will work.

 

Whether it is optimal is hard to say.  Also I'm not clear on whether you want to minimize total upgrade time or down time.

 

There are at least 3 ways to do this

(a) upgrade the disks in the RN314, and then migrate them to the RN526  (your plan)

(b) Migrate the existing disks to the RN526, and upgrade them in place (perhaps somewhat faster than your plan)

(c) create a fresh RAID volume on the RN526x and then use rsync to migrate the data (Marc_V's suggestion)

 

(c) has the least risk, and almost no down time, since you don't shift to the new NAS until the process is complete.  One downside of (c) is that you will lose any snapshots on the existing volume (since they can't be migrated with rsync).

 

(c) likely will take somewhat longer than (a) or (b) if all goes well.  How much longer depends on whether the ReadyNAS is being used while the disk upgrades are in process. 

 

But something will almost certainly go wrong with at least one of the upgrades if you execute plan (a) ~40 times.  That will create both longer elapsed times and down times for the sites where it fails.

 


@Digital999 wrote:

Additionally we do not have 'extra' disks at each site for the suggested operation. 

 


Just migrating the data using @Marc_V's suggestion doesn't require any extra disks.   You'd only need them if you wanted to keep the RN314 ReadyNAS in service as backups to the RN526.

 

 

 

 

 

Message 5 of 11
Digital999
Luminary

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?

To elaborate with details that I thought unimportant.

 

The current 314 unit has four drives installed.  They  are two Raid 1 pairs.

The 314 threw an error message regarding one of the drives and its error count.  Everything is still working at this time.

 

My thought was to replace the drive in error with a larger unit and then resync that pair.  After that operation  I was going to replace the older drive of the pair with a newer drive that matched the one just installed and synced,

 

After that process a reboot would in theory return the existing 314 to operation with larger drives. 

 

Now that I have a system that is operational and in theory stable, I wanted to move the larger pair to the new system.

 

The question was if that move would work with a new system and the drives from the older system.

 

I hope I explained my circumstance properly.

Message 6 of 11
StephenB
Guru

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?


@Digital999 wrote:

 

Now that I have a system that is operational and in theory stable, I wanted to move the larger pair to the new system.

 

The question was if that move would work with a new system and the drives from the older system.

 


Leaving the other RAID array in the RN314?   

 

That can be a bit tricky.  One aspect is that one of your arrays holds the home folder(s) and any apps that were installed.

 

It's likely simpler to use plan (c) to migrate that array, and then destroy the existing array on the RN314.

 

Message 7 of 11
Digital999
Luminary

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?

Thanks again to StephenB for pointing my nose to an appropriate approach.  My judgement was clouded by the error message I received today and trying to treat the situtation as if it had to be solved immediately. 

 

Option B seems the best, especially for the different locations and the personnel available. 

(b) Migrate the existing disks to the RN526, and upgrade them in place (perhaps somewhat faster than your plan)

 

What I was trying top avoid is establishing an identical configuration in the new system that matches the current configuration.  Most likely some of the details that have been added over the years have not been well documented and there will be issues.  Moving the disks would solve that concern if it works.

 

I am liking Option B

Can I actually take the existing disks and move them from the RN314 to the same position in the RN526?

The plan would be to move the disks to the identical position and then power on the RN526 system.

 

The best of all worlds since some of the ~40 systems do not need additional space but they certainly could use additional CPU horsepower.  The disk expansion, if needed, could be a phase II approach after the 526 hardware is operational. 

 

 

 

 

Message 8 of 11
StephenB
Guru

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?


@Digital999 wrote:

 

Can I actually take the existing disks and move them from the RN314 to the same position in the RN526?

The plan would be to move the disks to the identical position and then power on the RN526 system.

 


You can.

 

One subtlety here is how the ReadyNAS handles firmware mismatches.   Note that the ReadyNAS boots from the disks, and an install image is also saved in the ReadyNAS flash.

 

There are three scenarios related to the ReadyNAS firmware and migration:

  • If the firmware image in the RN526 matches the firmware on the RN314 disks, then nothing is updated.
  • If the firmware on the disks is newer than the RN526 firmware image, then the RN526 firmware image will be updated from the RN314 disks.
  • If the firmware image in the RN526 is newer than what is on the disks, then the firmware image updates the firmware on the disks.

A simpler way of saying this is that the newer firmware is always used. 

 

You can ensure that the firmware already on the RN314 is retained by doing a factory install on the RN526 with a single scratch disk first.  Then manually install the firmware that you want to use.  After that migrate the disks (power down, remove the scratch disk, move the RN314 disks into the proper slots).

 

Another strategy is to update the RN314s to run the the latest firmware before you migrate the disks.

Message 9 of 11
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?

Moving just one of two volumes to the new NAS will not work well.  You will need to do an EXPORT of the volume you are moving, but the OS does not handle it well when you put just an exported volume in a new NAS.  You need for there to already be a volume, with the imported one being a second (or third, etc.).  After that, you could export the orignal volume, leaving only the imported one.

 

There are also issues if the exported volume is the primary one.  Apps are not moved to the remaiiing one (though I have posted a procedure for moving them).  Home folder contents are also not moved, and I have seen a case where the home folders were not migrated at all (reported, but dismissed as not dupicatable).

 

But if you swap all drives, it works wonderfully.  Absolutely nothing special to do (do NOT export anything).  Since you are moving from an Intel based machine to another Intel based one, you don't even need to do anything about apps.

Message 10 of 11
Digital999
Luminary

Re: Upgrade plan… Will it work?

Thanks to everyone who responded.

 

Well it seems that both Sandshark and StephenB agree -- moving the drives in mass from the old system to a new system is  painless  way to  upgrade to more robust hardware. 

 

I checked with the Netgear folks and they said that the form factor for the drive bay enclosures was identical.  Just unplug form one system and plug into the other system.

 

My personal view is that this is a great sales opportunity for Netgear -- upgrade without any configuration aggraviation.  Truely a great feature that could lead to new sales since there is no measureable technical involvement.

 

 

 

 

Message 11 of 11
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