What does the upgrademanager do to the vaults?

[MarkPlimley]

What does the upgrademanager do on the fileservers? To run a rehearsal upgrade from a test server, I would like to simulate a replica fileserver without vault content by creating the folder structure and validating the folders in the UI. The production replica servers have too much content to easily clone for a rehearsal.

This is not officially supported but I wondered if it would work. Has anyone tried something like this? Seems like it is worth a try. If it doesn't work I can rerun the upgrademanager and use "Manually Configure File Servers Post Upgrade."

Mark

[BineshKumar1]

You can test it with empty vault folder or even with partial content. When you run upgrade manager, you can either select update file servers or keep the existing configuration. If you select update file server then the URLs for the file servers will be updated to new URL. Keep existing configuration can be used if you want to keep the same file server URLs.  Either way  if you select any option other than manual, the upgrade manager will try to do a configuration update to the file server. Just keep the target file servers up and running.

[MarkPlimley]

Thank you for the answer. Just to clarify, I have a situation where I am running the upgrademanager on a clone of the production server, loaded with the production database with the remote fileserver information.

I'm thinking of an upgrade scenario where I update file server and point it to a machine running the target release, but with vault folders that have nothing but the MOUNT_VALIDATON_DATA folder and it's contents. I think if I didn't have the same vault folder structure as expected by the clone installation, then I'm going to get some failures in the upgrademanager when it can't find the MOUNT_VALIDATON_DATA folders. I am hoping that with those folders, the upgrademanager won't care that there are no actual vault files, yes?

Not only that, I should be able to give the test replica server a hostname alias the same as the production replica, as long as DNS name lookups still resolve to the real replica. Do the same on the clone master, where the host file causes it to resolve to the IP address of the fake replilca and its own IP address instead of the real master. Then I should be able to use "Keep Existing File Vault Host Information" and the altered hosts file would prevent any actual connection to the production master and replica servers.

This question arises because of the statement under Keep Existing File Vault Host Information: "vaulted content will be updated during upgrade." They can't mean the content files; I assume they are referring to the validation data in those vault folders on the master and replica.

Mark

[BineshKumar1 · Accepted solution]

It works, as long as the DNS mapping is in place it shouldn't affect the production. Upgrade manager wouldn't modify anything with the vaults. I have seen the upgrade manager writing new files to folders but those are template files, I guess.

[MikeLockwood]

Many times it makes sense to do one or more rehearsal migrations with only the database, not dealing at all with the vaults.  Can test all functionality except file download (including viewables).

[MarkPlimley]

Thanks Binesh and Mike, you have covered my concerns. And the suggestion to plan more rehearsals is a great one. I will try to remember to add one last comment on how it goes.

Mark