Upgrading Stratusphere Appliances

Important: The following section applies specifically to Stratusphere appliances running Stratusphere 6.6.0-1 and newer ONLY.

If your appliances are on version 6.6.x and an in-place upgrade to 6.7.0-5 is supported, Liquidware strongly recommends migrating 6.6.x appliances first to 6.7.0-2 appliances to receive the current Postgres v16, and then upgrading to 6.7.0-5 to have the best performance, security, and system configuration. Liquidware strongly recommends this approach because if you upgrade directly to 6.7.0-5, your 6.6.x appliances will continue to run Postgres 12, which is no longer supported and End-of-Life as of November of 2024.

If your appliances are on version 6.5.x or older, refer to the Stratusphere Migration Guide to 6.7.x Appliances.

Preparation

  1. On a local desktop with access to the Internet, download the Stratusphere upgrade image by clicking the following link:
  2. https://cdn.liquidware.com/stratusphere/releases/stratusphere-6.7.0-5.img
  3. (Strongly recommended) Use the online Stratusphere Sizing Guide to resize your Stratusphere appliances appropriately to reduce the chance of data loss.
    1. Power down all your Stratusphere appliances: Hub, Database, and Collectors.
    2. Edit the appliance settings for each appliance and update them based on the Stratusphere Sizing Guide recommendations.

    3. Important: VMware vSphere Virtual Machine Hardware Version
      Due to recently published vulnerabilities, such as Spectre & Meltdown, VMware recommends upgrading the virtual machine hardware to the latest version supported by your vSphere infrastructure. While the Stratusphere appliances are powered down, upgrade their virtual machine hardware to version 10 or higher, as supported by the vSphere infrastructure. Refer to the VMware knowledge base article, "Upgrading a virtual machine to the latest hardware version (multiple versions)" for upgrading virtual machine hardware versions.

  4. (Recommended) Take a snapshot of the Hub, Database, and Collector appliances.
  5. Power up all your Stratusphere appliances: Hub, Database, and Collectors.
  6. (Recommended) Keep the local appliance consoles of the Stratusphere Hub, Database, and Collector open during the upgrade process.

  7. Note: This is helpful because the user can observe the upgrades running and their status, reboot activity, and uptime on the console status screens.

  8. (Recommended) Acquire and test the validity of passwords for accounts on the Web UI and console (friend, ec2-user, azureuser, etc.) that may have been modified from the default passwords. SSH in using the credentials for your appliance and run watch -c cat /tmp/status to monitor the status when a console is not available.

  9. Note: Any customizations applied within the appliance’s command line console (for example, iptables firewall rules, internal configuration files, custom users, etc.) may be lost on an upgrade. The end user is responsible for maintaining their own customizations and may need to manually reapply them after the update.

Upload Update

To upload the update, complete the following steps:

  1. Log in to the Administration section of the Stratusphere Hub Web UI.
  2. Navigate to the Hub Administration > Upgrades > Offline tab.
  3. The screen displays a page with either a Browse or Choose File button depending on your browser.
  4. Click the Browse or Choose File button, navigate to the location where the stratusphere_6.x.x.img file was stored when you downloaded it from the link above. Select the file, then open it.
  5. Click the Upload Update button. A progress bar with the message “Upload in Progress (This may take several minutes)” will be displayed as the upgrade image is uploaded to the Hub. This is a ~1.9 GB file, so depending on your network connection it might take a long time to upload.
  6. After the upload finishes, the progress bar displays the message “Download Completed. Verifying Image,” indicating that the Hub is verifying the integrity of image file that was uploaded.
  7. After the image is verified, the message “Upload Completed Successfully appears at the top of the page.

Install Update on Hub and Database

  1. Click the Install Update button to install the 6.x upgrade on the Stratusphere Hub.
  2. The UI displays a progress bar with the message “Install in Progress (This might take several minutes)."
  3. As soon as the upgrade starts, all services on the appliance are turned off. The UI then displays the message “Stratusphere is being upgraded after which the Hub will be rebooted. You will be logged out in 10 seconds. Please wait at least 15 minutes to log back in." The user is then logged out of the Web UI automatically and a generic “Stratusphere is down" message is displayed.
  4. At this point, you could close the browser tab and open the Hub and/or Database console windows and observe their status screens to see messages at the top like “Updates are Running”. On AWS & Azure, you can use your preferred SSH client to SSH into the appliance with your console credentials for your appliance and run watch -c cat /tmp/status command to view the console status screen. Alternatively, use the appliance console screen on AWS / Azure and refresh the appliance console web page to manually update the status screens to check whether the updates are running and for the uptime since a reboot.
  5. If a separate Database appliance is connected, its upgrade is initiated first and is rebooted automatically at the end of the upgrade.
  6. The Hub then upgrades itself and reboots as well. In some cases, the appliances might reboot again.
  7. Once the upgrade is completed and the appliance(s) reboot, use the uptime on the Hub appliance status screen at the top left of the screen next to top - to wait at least 15-30 minutes after the reboot of the Hub for all internal services to start before opening the web browser and accessing the UI again.

    8. Note: If the version number did not change, or if the login page did not load as expected, or the “Stratusphere is down” message does not clear, or if there are any “HTTP Status 404 – Not Found” error messages related to “The requested resource [/vscenter/] is not available” once you log in, then refer to the After upgrade, the Web UI displays a 404 Error topic in the Troubleshooting section.

Install Update on Collectors

If there are any Collectors on this installation of Stratusphere, complete the following steps:

  1. Navigate to the Collector Administration > Collectors tab.
  2. Select each 6.x Collector in the list one at a time and click the Upgrade button.
  3. The Collectors then upgrade and reboot themselves.
  4. After they reboot, wait about 15 minutes, then check their version number within the Web UI.

Update Connector ID Key Agents

To update Connector ID Key agents for persistent machines, complete the following steps:

  1. Log in to the Stratusphere Hub Web UI Administration section.
  2. Navigate to Hub Administration > Connector ID Keys > Connector ID Keys Properties tab.
  3. Select the appropriate machine group in the Configure properties for dropdown list.
  4. Scroll down and select the Automatically update Connector ID Keys when new software versions are installed in the Stratusphere Hub checkbox.
  5. Scroll down and click the Save button.
  6. The CID Keys then automatically download the installer for the updated version and upgrade themselves on their next callback.

For non-persistent machines, your master or gold images need to be updated with the new CID Key software. To update Connector ID Key agents for non-persistent machines, complete the following steps:

  1. Log in to the Stratusphere Hub Web UI Administration section.
  2. Navigate to the Hub Administration > Connector ID Keys > Connector ID Key Software tab.
  3. Download the appropriate installer for your environment.
  4. Open your gold image as an Administrator and follow the instructions outlined in the appendixes of the Stratusphere Installation & Configuration Guide to update agents on gold images.

Validate and Complete the Update

Before completing the upgrade and removing the snapshots, Liquidware recommends waiting for a few hours to ensure that the CID Keys agents call back in a round robin manner through their list of Collectors. Make sure that the following are true:

  • New data is being collected and saved within the database.
  • New data is visible within the Web UI.

After you verify that the installation has upgraded and is working properly, remove the snapshots from the Stratusphere appliances.

The upgrade process is then complete.