I’ve been doing some work with Rubrik in our lab and thought it worth covering some of the basic features that I think are pretty neat. In this edition of Rubrik Basics, I thought I’d quickly cover off software upgrades. There are two ways to upgrade the Rubrik software on your Brik – via USB and SFTP. Either way, you’ll need access to the Downloads section of the support site. If you’re a customer, you’ll have this already. If this all sounds too hard, you can raise a ticket with the support team and they’ll tunnel in and do the upgrade for you (assuming you’ve allowed remote tunnel capability).

USB

The good thing about using a USB drive is that you can still keep appliances in “dark” sites up to date. Before you begin you’ll need to do two things:

• Download the compressed upgrade archive and the matching signature file from the customer portal.
• Format a removable drive with the FAT32 file system.

You’ll need to copy the upgrade file and matching signature file to the removable drive. Plug that into any node in the cluster. Log in to that node as the admin user. Mount the USB drive by typing the following command:

mount --usb_device

Type the following command to begin the upgrade:

upgrade start

The upgrade system scans the file system for upgrade archives. If multiple archives are available, it display a list of choices. Once you’ve finished, you can unmount the device.

umount --usb_device

SFTP

You can also run the upgrade via SFTP. I found the instructions on how to do that here. It’s not too dissimilar to the USB method. You’ll want to use your favourite SFTP client to upload the files to the /upgrade directory. Once you’ve done that, ssh on to the node and you can run a pre-flight check. If everything comes up Milhouse you’ll be good to go for the next step.

Using username "admin".

admin@10.xxx.yyy.131's password:

=======================

Welcome to Rubrik CLI

=======================

Type 'help' or '?' to list commands

RVM165Sxxxx55 >> upgrade start --mode prechecks_only
Do you want to use --share rubrik-4.1.2-2366.tar.gz [y/N] [N]: y
Upgrade status: Started pre-checks successfully
RVM165Sxxxx55 >> upgrade status
Current upgrade mode: prechecks_only
Current upgrade pre-checks node: RVM165Sxxxx55
Current upgrade pre-checks tarball name: --share rubrik-4.1.2-2366.tar.gz
Current upgrade pre-checks status: In progress
Current run started at: 2018-07-19 00:48:04.437000 UTC+0000

Current state (3/6): VERIFYING
Current task: Verify authenticity of new software
Current state progress: 0.0%

Finished states (2/6): ACQUIRING, COPYING
Pending states (3/6): UNTARING, DEPLOYING, PRECHECKING

Time taken so far: 18.38 seconds
Overall upgrade progress: 6.0%

To check on progress, run “upgrade status” to, erm, check on the status of the upgrade.

RVM165Sxxxx55 >> upgrade status
Last upgrade mode: prechecks_only
Last upgrade pre-checks node: RVM165Sxxxx55
Last upgrade pre-checks tarball name: --share rubrik-4.1.2-2366.tar.gz
Last upgrade pre-checks status: Completed successfully
Last run ended at: 2018-07-19 00:51:03.129000 UTC+0000
Current state: IDLE

Now you’re ready to do it for real. Run “upgrade start” to start.

RVM165Sxxxx55 >> upgrade start
Do you want to use --share rubrik-4.1.2-2366.tar.gz [y/N] [N]: y
Upgrade status: Started upgrade successfully
RVM165Sxxxx55 >> upgrade status
Current upgrade mode: normal
Current upgrade node: RVM165Sxxxx55
Current upgrade tarball name: --share rubrik-4.1.2-2366.tar.gz
Current upgrade status: In progress
Current run started at: 2018-07-19 00:52:56.882000 UTC+0000

Current state (4/9): UNTARING
Current task: Extract new software
Current state progress: 0.0%

Finished states (3/9): ACQUIRING, COPYING, VERIFYING
Pending states (5/9): DEPLOYING, PRECHECKING, PREPARING, UPGRADING, RESTARTING

Time taken so far: 22.52 seconds
Overall upgrade progress: 3.5%

It’s a pretty quick process, and eventually you’ll see this message.

RVM165Sxxxx55 >> upgrade status
Last upgrade mode: normal
Last upgrade node: RVM165Sxxxx55
Last upgrade tarball name: --share rubrik-4.1.2-2366.tar.gz
Last upgrade status: Completed successfully
Last run ended at: 2018-07-19 01:19:09.719000 UTC+0000

Current state: IDLE
RVM165Sxxxx55 >>

And you’re all done. Note that you only have to upload the data and run the process on one node in the cluster.