Basics – Handling Upgrades Through Data Domain Management Center

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s been a raft of updates in July, including updates for the Data Domain Operating System (DDOS) and Data Domain Management Center (DDMC).

Customers who are newer to Data Domain sometimes feel leery of upgrading their protection storage, but I think this is unwise and unfounded. Unfounded because it’s actually quite simple, and unwise because without upgrading the Data Domain operating system, there’s a limit on what Boost libraries you can use within your environment to get the most out of your data protection system.

In this post, I’m going to run through the upgrade process to let you see how simple it actually is. In my lab, I had DDMC v2 (upgraded from an initial DDMC 1.4.x install), as well as 2 x DDVE (Data Domain Virtual Edition) 0.5TB systems. One had been deployed as DDVE v2 and upgraded to DDVE v3, and the other deployed as DDVE v3. (Both DDVEs had been manually upgraded to 6.1.x, but that’s not essential for the upgrades that I’m going to run through here.)

While you can upgrade Data Domains directly from the individual Data Domain System Manager (accessed via https://dataDomainName), I’m going to run through the entire upgrade process from within DDMC itself. (Check here for an earlier post about DDMC.)

As always if you’re going to upgrade your DDOS versions, first make sure you check out the online compatibility guide to confirm it will be compatible with the version(s) of your data protection software.

The first step was to download the upgrade packages from the Dell EMC Support Site. I like to use the ‘Support by Product’ section to quickly jump through to the respective systems – you’ll be after Data Domain Management Center, and either Data Domain as the products to download the upgrade packages.

With the packages downloaded, the first step was to log onto the DDMC server:

01 DDMC Login
01 DDMC Login

Once you login to DDMC, you’ll get the standard dashboard showing you the health and status of all the Data Domains you have under management:

02 DDMC Main Screen
02 DDMC Main Screen

To upgrade DDMC itself, you want to click the Gear icon, next to the Power icon, on the top right-hand of the screen. This will bring up the System management dialog:

03 DDMC System
03 DDMC System

We want to go to the ‘Upgrade’ section under SYSTEM, so if you click there you’ll get access for upgrading your DDMC. Remember, this is the DDMC upgrade, not the upgrade for the DDVEs, which will be covered later.

04 DDMC Upgrade View
04 DDMC Upgrade View

The first thing that gets done is to upload the upgrade package. Click the “+ Add” button to start that process off.

05 DDMC Upgrade Replace Package
05 DDMC Upgrade Replace Package

In this case, because I’d already upgraded DDMC in the past, I had an upgrade package on the system, and was prompted to confirm that I’d be OK with replacing that package. Hitting Yes to continue, I got the file selection window:

06 DDMC Upgrade Add Package
06 DDMC Upgrade Add Package

To upload a package, just click Browse… to browse your local storage, and select the DDMC RPM file that you want to use for the upgrade:

07 DDMC Upgrade Package Selected
07 DDMC Upgrade Package Selected

With the package selected, you can click Upload to get the upload of the RPM file underway to the DDMC. Don’t worry – at this point that’s not going to trigger the upgrade itself.

08 DDMC Package Upload
08 DDMC Package Upload

Depending on your network speed, the package upload should only take a minute or so – I did mine over WiFi at the worst reception spot in my house, so it took 3 or 4 minutes.

09 DDMC Ready for Upgrade
09 DDMC Ready for Upgrade

Once the package has been uploaded, you can click the Upgrade button to initiate the upgrade process.

10 DDMC Confirm Upgrade OK
10 DDMC Confirm Upgrade OK

This is now your final prompt about whether you’re going to do the DDMC upgrade. Click Yes to get it underway. You’ll get a progress dialog – which for some reason, Chrome mangled for me a little bit:

11 DDMC Upgrade in Progress
11 DDMC Upgrade in Progress

Once the upgrade was underway to the point of requiring a system reboot, DDMC pushed me back out to the login screen. I left it 10 minutes or so while I worked on some other bits and pieces, then reloaded the login screen to check where it was at – or rather, switched to Firefox to get around whatever was happening with progress bars in Chrome for the next part. This gave me a DDMC 6.1.2.5 login screen:

12 DDMC 6.1.2.5 Login
12 DDMC 6.1.2.5 Login

The dashboard under 6.1.2.5 is largely the same, viz.:

13 DDMC Dashboard
13 DDMC Dashboard

Likewise, Capacity Projection remains pretty much the same between DDMC 2.x and 6.1.2.x:

14 DDMC Projected Capacity
14 DDMC Projected Capacity

With DDMC upgraded, it was time to move on to upgrading my two DDVEs. The first step was to make sure my NetWorker server wasn’t using them, since the upgrade will take the filesystem down and reboot the DDVE. Since NetWorker was not doing anything, it was fine to continue. (In fact, there’s a set of steps you can do before the upgrade process is triggered, so you can do preparation before needing to take an outage in your backup application(s).)

In order to upgrade a Data Domain from DDMC, you go to the Inventory panel, which will give you a view similar to the following:

15 DDMC Upgrade DD Panel
15 DDMC Upgrade DD Panel

Clicking on Upgrade will give you a menu to choose between performing an upgrade, and uploading an upgrade package:

16 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Packages Menu
16 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Packages Menu

Note that when you upload an upgrade package, it uploads it to DDMC – so you only need to handle the upload process once, and DDMC will handle all the work relating to transferring upgrade packages to Data Domains.

17 DDMC Manage Upgrade Packages Wizard 1
17 DDMC Manage Upgrade Packages Wizard 1

Clicking through to upgrade gave me the view of what upgrade packages were available, so I clicked “+ ADD” to add a new upgrade package to the system.

18 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Packages 2
18 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Packages Wizard 2

Pretty similarly to the DDMC upgrade process, I selected the DDOS upgrade package from my local storage so that I could add it.

19 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Packages Wizard 3 Upload In Progress
19 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Packages Wizard 3 Upload In Progress

You’ll get a progress dialog for the upload of the package, and then once it’s complete you’ll get a dialog showing you that’s been finished:

20 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Packages Upload Complete
20 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Packages Upload Complete

Now with the upgrade package in place, I could move on to the actual upgrade.

21 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Start
21 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Start

I selected the Data Domain I wanted to upgrade first, and from the Upgrade menu chose “Upgrade”, which brings up the upgrade wizard:

22 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Wizard 1
22 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Wizard 1

The wizard itself is a pretty straight forward process. Once you’ve satisfied you’ve selected the right Data Domain and the right upgrade package, proceed with the upgrade by clicking NEXT to continue.

23 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Wizard 2
23 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Wizard 2

This is your final check to confirm you’re ready to upgrade the Data Domain. (As always, make sure you’ve read the release notes and guidance on upgrades, in case there’s any caveats or special instructions.) Remember that the upgrade can take a little while to complete – make sure you’ve got a maintenance window with your business before proceeding to the upgrade.

24 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Wizard 3
24 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Wizard 3

Once I hit UPGRADE, the process started, and you can expand out the status per the above screen shot, showing you what steps DDMC is up to. First it will transfer the upgrade RPM to the Data Domain, verify and run pre-checks, etc., then get the upgrade underway. You can close the upgrade dialog if you want and monitor the upgrade progress under the Health section of DDMC, or you can leave the dialog open and once it’s confirmed the upgraded Data Domain is back up and running, it will refresh the wizard as follows:

25 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Complete
25 DDMC Manage DD Upgrade Complete

With the upgrade complete, I closed the dialog box and repeated the process for my second Data Domain Virtual Edition. At the end of that process, the System Inventory window gave me an updated view:

26 DDMC DD Upgrades Complete
26 DDMC DD Upgrades Complete

And there you have it – DDMC, and a pair of DDVEs upgraded, all within the web based GUIs, with just a few mouse clicks. It’s really a very straight forward process.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.