Preinstallation or Upgrade Planning

This installation guide describes installing and upgrading VVR. Before installing or upgrading VVR:

  Confirm that your system has enough free disk space to install VVR.

  Make sure you have root permissions. You must have root permissions to perform the install and upgrade procedures.

For a detailed explanation of the VVR tunables, see VERITAS Volume Replicator Planning and Tuning Guide. For information about how to change the value of the tunables, see the VERITAS Volume Replicator Administrator's Guide. These documents are available on the documentation disc. For more information on the documentation disc, see the Getting Started Guide.

Planning a VEA Installation

  The VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA) server VRTSob must be installed on the hosts on which VVR is installed.

  The VEA providers must be installed on the hosts on which VVR is installed, not on the client.

  If you plan to run the VEA client on a machine other than the machine to be administered, install the VEA client on the machine where the client will run. Refer to the VERITAS Storage Foundation Installation Guide for instructions on installing VEA clients.

  To use the VVR functionality in VEA, the VERITAS Volume Replicator Service Provider package, VRTSvrpro, must be installed on all hosts in the Replicated Data Set (RDS).

  For VRTSvrpro to function, the VERITAS Volume Manager Management Services Provider package, VRTSvmpro, must be installed on your system.

  To use the functionality for receiving SNMP notifications and email notifications, the VERITAS Action Provider package, VRTSap, and the VERITAS Task Execution Provider package, VRTStep, must be installed.

Planning an Upgrade from VVR 3.5 Update 3

VVR is capable of replicating data between VVR 4.1 and VVR 3.5 Update 3. The major advantage is that this removes the restriction of upgrading the Primary and Secondary at the same time.

When replicating between versions, you can easily upgrade VVR with reduced application downtime. While the Primary is being upgraded, the application can be migrated to the Secondary, thus reducing downtime. The replication between the (upgraded) Primary and the Secondary which have different versions of VVR will still continue. This facilitates high availability even when the VVR upgrade is not complete on both the nodes.

If you do not need to upgrade all the hosts in the RDS simultaneously, you can use replication between versions after you upgrade one host. The upgrade can be performed either on the Primary or on the Secondary. You can then upgrade the other hosts in the RDS later at your convenience.

If you have a cluster setup, you must upgrade all the nodes in the cluster at the same time. For more information on upgrading VVR when VCS is present, see Upgrading VVR When VCS Agents are Configured.