We are shortly going to be upgrading our servers to Domino 6 from 5.0.xx. Firstly we are going to upgrade our Administration server and then the rest after that.
My questions are this:
Our Administration server is part of a cluster. After upgrading to Domino 6, will there be any problems with replication, etc with a Domino 5.0.10 server? We are most likely going to upgrade the other half of the cluster at the same time, but I just want to make sure it’ll work in case we don’t get the second server done at the same time.
Should we go straight for upgrading from 5.0.10 → 6.0.1CF, or upgrade to 6.0 first.
Nothing on the forum that i’ve seen answers the clustering question, so i’d appreciate any feedback from people that may have already done this.
Subject: Upgrading to Domino 6 soon - Are there any issues with upgrading only 1 half of a Cluster??
Logically I see some problem with this logic.
Whenever you are going to mix up your Lotus Notes server environment, you will always need to account for lowest common denominator. So if I was to upgrade in the situation as you describe, then I would expect to not upgrade mail file design or the names.nsf. Why? Because in upgrading them to R6 I will probably get cirular errors or other errors because the template was coded for the R6 server/client not R5.
So I would not replicate the named.nsf and the other core databases for the server because the process will make them R6. With the other databases that I have the cluster with… you will have to wait until the cluster server is at the same version of the other half. Then you can upgrade after that.
Hope this helps… Cheers…
Joe
PS
Let me know if you want more information per my cluster experience (I can sure it outside the forum via my email addres (In the profile)).
Subject: RE: Upgrading to Domino 6 soon - Are there any issues with upgrading only 1 half of a Cluster??
Hi Joe,
Thanks for your response. I downloaded the Redbook for “Upgrading to Lotus Notes and Domino 6” and in there it suggests that you should upgrade the design of the names.nsf using the new template after running the server setup (from command line in OS) and also upgrade ODS level as early on as possible. What is your view on this? We are planning to upgrade our other cluster server at the same time, so would it be ok to upgrade the names/ods version?
I may take up your offer on getting more info, as this is quite a big task for us.
Subject: RE: Upgrading to Domino 6 soon - Are there any issues with upgrading only 1 half of a Cluster??
After we upgrade a server to 6.01, CF1 we run fixup, compact -K, and updall on all databases whil ehte srever is down. It takes a long time but it has avoided those post upgrade errors.
Subject: RE: Upgrading to Domino 6 soon - Are there any issues with upgrading only 1 half of a Cluster??
Yes, we’re also seeing quite a bit of the document level corruption. But it wasn’t there before we upgraded the servers. We had already upgraded our NABs to ND6 a month or more ago. But next was the servers. We also found a new bug with 6.01 mail.box and mail getting stuck. It seems that if a mail message destined for a user that had no mail file would not be instantly returned with a delivery failure. Instead it would wait for 24 hours before it would be returned. Lotus has SPRd this one and provided us a notes.ini parm that seems to help. I’m not sure what we’re going to do about the corruption in mail files, but a compact -C didn’t seem to fix our issues on the one server. What does the -i parm do?
Subject: RE: Upgrading to Domino 6 soon - Are there any issues with upgrading only 1 half of a Cluster??
Hi All,
We ran the upgrade from R5.0.10 to LD6.0.2CF1 about a month ago now and I just thought i’d let you know how we got on. After upgrading our Admin server, we proceeded to upgrade the second half of the cluster. Both servers are fine and I only had a few minor issues to sort out (corrupt views in databases and invalid or non-existent document errors). Both of these issues were corrected by running fixup -f -j -v -l and compact -c -i -K -F on the databases.
All in all, the upgrade was a complete success and we have experienced no problems (touch wood!).
Subject: RE: Upgrading to Domino 6 soon - Are there any issues with upgrading only 1 half of a Cluster??
A comment here… As you say, ND6 Names.nsf was designed to work with 5 and even 4.6, so that’s fine. Compacting the databases would be fine, but obviously you don’t want ODS 43 on a 5.x server!
After all was said and done, we had a lot of the ‘bad document’ sort of wrror also, due to database corruption from a long time of not compacting. We ran compact -c -i (as recommended by Lotus) and that fixed things.
(However, you may want the option to revert to the lower ODS to keep them at 41.)
Subject: Upgrading to Domino 6 soon - Are there any issues with upgrading only 1 half of a Cluster??
Although we cannot say for sure it is specifically related, we believe we are seeing some mail file and replication issues with a mixed cluster environment. 1/2 of our cluster is 6.01 and the other 1/2 is 5.010 right now. We are having a lot of failed replication error messages with “invalid or non-existent document” when trying to replicate, either through the cluster or through the connection docs doing the manual replication. We’ve opened and incident with Lotus on this.
Secondly, we have been seeing some mail file inconsistencies and corruption. Several things appear to be happening…the new mail goes into the all docs view and not the inbox (fixed by removing and replacing the inbox folder design element), the cluster replicas are inconsistent and could be off several hundreds of documents (fixed by removing the bad replica and recreating it), the replicas are in sync, but not correct in some way or both replicas are incorrect (fixed by doing restores in most cases), more delivery failures because of “too many unique fields” error (fixed by rebuilding the mail file to a new copy/replica), etc. Now, we have about 4000 people on this cluster total and we’ve probably seen 20-25 in the last two weeks, so it isn’t a huge percentage, but enough to make us concerned. We are proceeding with our upgrade of the other 1/2 to 6.01 next weekend, but we are really sitting on the fence as to whether our new found errors and issues will increase or decrease with the cluster all 6.01.
Hope this information helps, and I hope you don’t see the kind of fallout we are seeing. Thanks.
Subject: RE: Upgrading to Domino 6 soon - Are there any issues with upgrading only 1 half of a Cluster??
Sandy,
Thanks for your response and comments on this. I’ll bear this in mind if we do decide to go ahead. If we do, i’ll post here with how successful/unsuccessful the upgrade was.