This section documents information concerning the upgrade. Be sure you are also familiar with the new features and new configuration introduced in the upgrade bundle, being the REM software and/or REM plugins.

Information required

Maintenance window

In general an upgrade of multiple REM hosts can be completed in a single maintenance window. The maintenance window should be of adequate length (at least 2 minutes for each REM host).

Product upgrade order

A Sentinel deployment may consist of multiple products: REM, GAA, VoLTE, and IPSMGW. The clusters must be upgraded in the following order: REM (with plugins), then GAA, then VoLTE, then IPSMGW. (For clarity, all GAA nodes must be upgraded before any VoLTE nodes, and all VoLTE before any IPSMGW.)

For major upgrades, you will need to upgrade all products in close succession, since having upgraded REM to a new version first, you need to upgrade all the other products soon after to ensure that the REM plugins for the products retain maximum compatibility, and are able to provide the best management interface.

Additional parameters supplied to orca

All REM-related orca commands (status, upgrade-rem, rollback-rem, cleanup-rem) support the following parameters:

  • --remote-tomcat-home <tomcat-dir> to specify the path to the Apache Tomcat instance containing the REM installation. Specify the <tomcat-dir> parameter as an absolute path, e.g. /home/sentinel/apache-tomcat-8.5.29.

  • --remote-tomcat-base <tomcat-dir> to specify the path to the Apache Tomcat software. Normally this is the same as the value for --remote-tomcat-home and hence does not need to be specified separately. See also here.

  • --backup-dir <backup-dir> to specify the path where orca will look for, or store, backups of the REM installation.

These must be specified after the command, e.g. ./orca --hosts remhost1 status --backup-dir /var/tmp/rem-backups.

Files required

Upgrade bundle

Your Metaswitch Customer Care Representative should have provided you with an upgrade bundle, normally named rem-<uplevel-version>-upgrade-bundle.zip or similar. unzip the bundle to a directory of your choice and cd to it.

Important
orca working directory

orca must always be run from the directory where it resides. It will fail to operate correctly if run from any other location.

Verify the orca script is present and executable by running ./orca --help. You should see usage information.

Verify that orca can contact the REM hosts you wish to upgrade by running the follow command:

./orca --hosts <remhost1,remhost2,…​> status

You should see status information about all the hosts specified.

Note
SSH access to hosts

orca requires passwordless SSH access to hosts, i.e. all REM hosts must be accessible from the machine running orca using SSH keys. If this is not the case, orca will throw an error saying it is unable to contact one or more of the hosts. Ensure SSH key-based access is set up to all such hosts and retry the status command until it works.
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