Support for Storage Foundation High Availability (SFHA) Solutions 6.1 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5 and Oracle Linux (OL6.5)

Problem

Support for Storage Foundation and High Availability (SFHA) Solutions 6.1 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5

Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions (SFHA) 6.1 by default does not support RHEL 6.5 or OL 6.5 due to incompatibility with the kernel interface. Veritas has released three patches to address this.

SFHA 6.1 is qualified with RHEL6.5 and OL6.5 (RHEL-compatible kernel) with these patches installed.

Solution

Veritas has released three patches to provide support of SFHA 6.1 on RHEL 6.5 and OL 6.5, these patches require SFHA 6.1 to be installed. The three patches are published as a single installable entity (Patch bundle) on the SORT Patch page, the individual link is provided below.

Note: The combined patch sfha-rhel6_x86_64-61.0.200 can only be installed on systems with RHEL6.5 or OL 6.5.

Patch Installation

There are a number of installation methods available for the single patch bundle, depending on the scenario: 

New SFHA 6.1 Installation: Single-step Installation using Install Bundles

If SFHA 6.1 is being installed for the first time, the 6.1 base software AND the above patches can be installed in a single step using the Install Bundles feature. Install Bundles remove the requirement to install the patches in a serial fashion. An example of a new installation using Install Bundles is listed below. For more information on the 6.1 Install Bundles feature, see the Storage Foundation and High Availability 6.1 Installation Guide for your product and the video: Using Install Bundles to Simplify Install/Upgrade

New SFHA 6.1 Installation: Multi-Step installation using the traditional approach

If SFHA 6.1 is being installed for the first time, the 6.1 base software can be installed on its own, followed by the bundle of patches. Installation Instructions for the Patch are contained in the README of the patch bundle.

Patch installation on existing SFHA 6.1  product: Single step installation

If SFHA 6.1 is already installed, the patches can be installed in a single step using the patch installer script (install_sfha610_rhel6_5). An example of this is listed below. Installation instructions are contained in the README of the patch bundle.

Installation Examples :

New Installation of SFHA 6.1 AND above patches using Install Bundles on a RHEL 6.5 system (Single step)

Install Bundles allow you to install or upgrade your systems to a base, maintenance or patch level in one step, rather than the traditional multi-step installation.

In this example, SFHA 6.1 will be installed on a RHEL6.5 system, along with the above three patches in a single step.

The SFHA 6.1 installation media and the above patches will need to be available on the system.

The SFHA 6.1 installation media is available from Download Center (DC) which replaces the earlier FileConnect portal.

The patches are available from the SORT links shown above and are slowly been transferred to DC.

For more information on the SFHA installation process, please refer to the Storage Foundation High Availability Installation Guide for your product.

Steps:

1) Download the SFHA 6.1 Installation media and extract to a directory. In this example, /opt/sw/6.1 is used to extract the 6.1 media.

2) Download the above combination patch (VxFS, ODM and LLT) and extract to a single directory. In this example, /tmp/patches is used

# cp  sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar.gz /tmp/patches

# cd /tmp/patches

# gunzip sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar.gz

# tar xvf sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar

3) Run the installer utility from the SFHA 6.1 base media and specify the patch directory that contains the extracted patch:

 /opt/sw/6.1/dvd1-redhatlinux/rhel6_x86_64/installer -hotfix_path /tmp/patches

4) Continue to follow the installer prompts and menu's to install and configure the product.

Patch Installation on an existing SFHA 6.1 installation

In this scenario, the combined patch (containing VXFS, ODM, and LLT patches) will be installed on an existing SFHA 6.1 cluster comprising of nodes server101 and server102. The patch is available from the SORT link above.

Steps:

1) Download the above combination patch (VxFS, ODM, and LLT) and extract to a single directory. In this example, /tmp/patches is used

# cp  sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar.gz /tmp/patches

# cd /tmp/patches

# gunzip sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar.gz

# tar xvf sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar

2) Run the patch installation script from the patch directory and specify the servers to which it is to be applied. In this example it is being applied to server101 and server102:

/tmp/patches/install_sfha610_rhel6_5 server101 server102
 

3) Continue to follow the Patch Installer prompts

Upgrading the operating system on a SFHA 6.1 system to RHEL 6.5

In this scenario, SFHA, SFCFS or SFRAC 6.1 is already installed and configured on a RHEL 6.x supported update and the OS is to be upgraded to RHEL6.5. i.e. The pre-upgrade setup contains SFCFS 6.1 on RHEL6.4. Steps:

1) Upgrade the OS to RHEL 6.5 using the DVD or other means - Refer to respective OS documentation for the upgrade.

Note: After the OS upgrade, the SFHA stack will fail to start completely due to incompatible modules (VxFS, ODM, and LLT)

2) Download the above combination patch (VxFS, ODM, and LLT) and extract to a single directory. In this example, /tmp/patches is used

# cp  sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar.gz /tmp/patches

# cd /tmp/patches

# gunzip sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar.gz

# tar xvf sfha-rhel6_x86_64-6.1.0.200-rpms.tar

3) Apply the patch using the patch installation script from the patch directory and specify the servers to which it is to be applied. In this example it is being applied to server101 and server102:

 /tmp/patches/install_sfha610_rhel6_5 server101 server102
 

4) Continue to follow the Patch Installer prompts

5) After successfully installing the required patches for RHEL6.5 support, all SFHA processes will be started by the installation script.

For more information on the upgrade process, please refer to the Storage Foundation High Availability Installation Guide for your product.

Patch Removal

Refer to the README file for removal instructions for the patches.

Known Issues

The installation pre-check for the ApplicationHA product only checks the presence for the 64-bit version of the libstdc++ library. The 32-bit version of the library is required for ApplicationHA to function.

Applies To

Storage Foundation (SF) 6.1

Storage Foundation High Availability (SFHA) 6.1

Storage Foundation Cluster File System (SFCFS) 6.1

Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC (SFRAC) 6.1

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5

Oracle Linux (OL) 6.5