Scope

Over the past few years, the Atempo deduplication products have evolved a lot.

For customers who may not have followed the pace of releases, questions arise on how to catch up.

General rules

You should always consult the release notes of the target version as it might contain pre-requisites and limitations, prior to performing an upgrade.

Versions are indicated by the first 2 digits hence 4.0.4 is Version 4.0 Service Pack 4

The current version is 5.1. You can find the current documentation, compatibility guide and release notes on the site https://usergroup.atempo.com.

At the time of writing this document, the current release is 5.1.9 hence Version 5.1 Service Pack 9.

Unless otherwise documented the server software is downward compatible with agents hence a 4.0.4 agent will operate with a 5.1.9 server, but with the functionalities that were available in version 4.0.4.

Important changes since 4.0

• In 5.0 the web Administration Interface has been completely rewritten in HTML5 removing the dependency on Flash.
• The notion of tenants has been introduced allowing to divide a server into multiple tenants that act as separate server environments. This allows the server administrator to delegate management of a particular tenant to specific people.
• A new user “superadmin” has been introduced to manage the server-wide operations where “admin” profiles are now restricted to tenant wide operations, and only for the particular tenant they belong to.

Example : In command mode, showing the active services within ADE using the service command requires superadmin but superadmin can NOT perform a backup or resto operation in any tenant as this is a tenant wide activity.

Tina customers using HVDS to backup virtual machines should be aware that if the Tina version used is 4.6.4 or higher they will migrate automatically from HVDSv1 (Lina style backups) to HVDSv2 (HSS style backups). An upgrade to HVDS 5.0 or higher will convert the backups to streams hence during this conversion disk space usage for metadata will increase and some performance impact will be noticed during the first backups after the upgrade.

Consult the Time Navigator documentation for details.

Lina customers should be aware that in 5.0 the network ports used by the Lina agents changes to 8181 instead of the 9080 or 9443 default ports. The 5.x agents use 8181 for both http and https agent traffic. The data traffic from the agent therefore shares the same network path as the admin interface (possibility to add a second port for data is available with version 5.1.9, see below).

Version 5.1 introduces the change of the block index database technology. As a result, an upgrade to version 5.1 will migrate the RDM database to a RocksDB database. The upgrade will therefore require additional disk space for the migration and the upgrade will take more time to complete as the migration needs to complete before normal operation can resume.

RocksDB technology uses available resources in a significantly different way than RDM. Post upgrade you will notice an increase of RAM usage possibly resulting in out of memory situations if the hosts have not been sized according to the requirements.

In 5.1.9 the possibility to configure a separate network port for the admin console is available so the admin can use 8182 where the data traffic including replication will use the default 8181.

Recommendations

Before upgrading make sure to have an up to date copy of the dedup.db file in a safe location.

This dedup.db file can be in different location depending on the version you are running so you might need to search if it is not in the database directory. This small database contains the configuration of the server. If it gets lost or damaged, the data is non recoverable.

If upgrading from a version lower than 4.04 make sure to upgrade to 5.0.11 before the final upgrade to 5.1.9 or higher.

An upgrade package to 5.0.11 is available on support.atempo.com in the legacy section but please note that this package is for upgrade only and does NOT include the database software hence it can not be used for a fresh install.

As stated previously current versions are making full use of the available hardware.

Make sure your server is following the requirements (SSD type disk for the index database) and adequate RAM and disk space for swap (pagefile) available.

Verify that the network infrastructure (firewalls) is configured opening the new ports, check reverse proxy configurations to handle the new agents.

We suggest you do a small test install on a virtual machine using the 30day test license to get familiar with the new interfaces and to check out your infrastructure readiness before doing the upgrade.