Upgrading Your Rubrik CDM Cluster via CLI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Introduction

This is a historical CLI walkthrough using a CDM 5.3 package as its example. Before planning an upgrade, check the supported upgrade path and prerequisites for your installed version in the Rubrik documentation and customer support portal. Rubrik also documents the CLI upgrade workflow and upgrades through Rubrik Security Cloud; access to the documentation may require a Rubrik account.

Welcome to my first post! Today, I want to share with you a quick rundown on how to upgrade a Rubrik CDM cluster via CLI. Whether you’re a seasoned IT professional or a newbie, this guide will walk you through the process step-by-step, so you can upgrade your cluster with confidence. Let’s dive in!

How to upgrade your Rubrik CDM Cluster

1. First, check the compatibility matrix and supported upgrade path in the Rubrik Support Portal (an eligible Rubrik Support Portal account is required). Use the package and verification instructions for your actual target release; the filenames and MD5 output below are historical examples.

2. Download the suitable package from the download area of the support portal and note the corresponding MD5 Hash.

3. After the download is complete, compare the noted MD5 Hash with the MD5 Hash from the downloaded .zip-File. In Windows, you can use the Command Prompt to generate the MD5 Hash for the .zip-File

    C:\Users\MyUser\Downloads > certutil -hashfile rubrik-image-5.3.0-p3-18540.zip MD5
   

   The output should look like this MD5-Hash from rubrik-image-5.3.0-p3-18540.zip: b030cb71aa684e881ea292bcdfc69060

   Compare this output with the noted MD5 from the Support Portal

4. When both MD5 Hashes match, unzip the components of the .zip-File, not further. The Output will be a .tar.gz with a big size and a .tar.gz.sig with a very small size.

5. Connect via WinSCP to one Rubrik node (or the floating IP of your cluster, which is in reality, one node) and upload both files to the folder “/upgrade”. The user for the login is “adminstaging” and the password comes from the standard admin user.

6. Navigate to the Rubrik GUI, log in with administrative access, and from the settings in the top right corner hit “Pause Protection”.

7. On your cluster’s GUI, check for live mounts; if so, unmount or remove them.

8. For the upgrade, connect via SSH (Putty or Windows Command Prompt) to the node (or floating IP), to which you recently uploaded the update-image. In this case, you must use the admin user and the corresponding password.

9. Run a pre-check with cluster upgrade start --mode prechecks_only and select the current upgrade package. After the pre-check is successful, begin with the upgrade, otherwise, contact Rubrik Support.

10. To start the upgrade, type in cluster upgrade start. When you get multiple packages, mostly old versions lying around the “/upgrade” folder, select the currently downloaded one.

11. You can watch the upgrade status via cluster upgrade status. To continuously watch the upgrade status, you can use cluster upgrade status watch.

12. In the original four-node example, the upgrade took approximately 45 minutes. Duration and upgrade states depend on the release, upgrade mode, and cluster. The eleven states in that example were…

    • ACQUIRING
    • COPYING
    • VERIFYING
    • UNTARING
    • DEPLOYING
    • PRECHECKING
    • PREPARING
    • IMAGING
    • CONFIGURING
    • MIGRATING
    • RESTARTING

    Your SSH Session will be disconnected multiple times, don’t panic. You can always
    reconnect to the node via SSH and watch the status with cluster upgrade status watch

13. After completing the upgrade, delete the used *.tar.gz and *.tar.gz.sig files from the node you uploaded them to at the beginning, connect to the Rubrik GUI, and resume the protection through the settings menu.

    The upgrade is done 🙂