XSAN 2.3 & Lion to 3.0 and Mountain Lion upgrade

rlackeyjr · partially protected Joined: 10 Mar 2013 Posts: 5

Hi guys,

I have a very happy XSAN 2.3 running on Lion and need to add some Mountain Lion clients. The first time I gave up as the ML client refused to authenticate... I couldn't even add it. So I just installed Lion on the new Mac Pro that came with ML and it worked fine, but now that's not so practical, so I think it's time to bring the whole shebang up to ML.

I have searched for information on this as I'll be upgrading a live XSAN, is there anything I need to be aware of?

Thanks,

Rich

thomasb · Been around the blocks Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 24

Hi,

We have been running 10.8.3 and Xsan 3 for a few months now at one of our smaller regional offices, and it seems to be running fine.

We are going to upgrade our big MultiSAN with 7 MDCs and 100 clients from 10.7.5 to 10.8.x and Xsan 3 this summer, and we'll upgrade 3-4 smaller installations before that.

Remember to backup all your Xsan and volume config files, including getting a cvlabel backup via Terminal:

abstractrude · Xsan Master Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 860

My only note is I had a 10.7>10.8 upgrade completely delete the OD Master. I had a backup of course but the whole directory was just gone after upgrade. Other than that, upgrades seem to be going well.

digitaldesktop · partially protected Joined: 21 Nov 2008 Posts: 5

We have a system that is running 10.8.2 on the MDCs, and a combination of 10.8.2, 10.7.5 and 10.6.8 on the clients. We saw the same issue where LUNs were not being discovered on the 10.6.8 clients.

We traced it down to how the Macs do LUN discovery. It changed dramatically in 10.7 and 10.8 and is also related to how Apple has changed its multipathing support. More specifically, Apple changed their support of AULA.

Thus, what we have found with an Areca-based controller is that you need to enable the ability to have Unique WWNN. Once we flipped the switch, all was well.

It should also be noted that you should not mix AULA and non-AULA enabled storage. If the non-AULA storage can NOT be switched into AULA mode, then all storage should be made non-AULA.

Hope this helps.

abstractrude · Xsan Master Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 860

DigitalDesktop
Just to expand on what you said. Its more than the OS version, it also has to do with the Apple branded LSI cards. They also want the Apple style multi-pathing. If you are running ATTO and 10.7 or later all is good.

rlackeyjr · partially protected Joined: 10 Mar 2013 Posts: 5

Hi Guys,

I started this thread, just wanted to say thanks for responding and all is mostly well. I just installed ML and ML server on the MDC's one by one, the volumes failing over each time, and then upgraded the clients only after the MDC's and it all happened without any interruption at all.

Just having some trouble with two clients not wanting to mount... asking me to check fibre cables, but they see the LUNS so that's the last niggling thing I have to figure out.

Thanks,

Rich

thomasb · Been around the blocks Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 24