Knowledgebase: Administration
How do I upgrade from one version of MarkLogic Server to another?
15 June 2020 08:25 PM

Introduction

Upgrading individual MarkLogic instances and clusters is generally very easy to do and in most cases requires very little downtime. In most cases, shutting down the MarkLogic instance on each host in turn, uninstalling the current release, installing the updated release and restarting each MarkLogic instance should be all you need to be concerned about...

However, unanticipated problems do sometimes come to light and the purpose of this Knowledgebase article is to offer some practical advice as to the steps you can take to ensure the process goes as easily as possible - this is particularly important if you're planning an upgrade between major releases of the product.

Prerequisites

While the steps outlined under the process heading below offer practical advice as to what to do to ensure your data is safeguarded (by recommending that backups are taken prior to upgrading), another very useful step would be to ensure you have your current configuration files backed up.

Each host in a MarkLogic cluster is configured using parameters which are stored in XML Documents that are available on each host. These are usually relatively small files and will zip up to a manageable size.

If you cd to your "Data" directory (on Linux this is /var/opt/MarkLogic; on Windows this is C:\Program Files\MarkLogic\Data and on OS X this is /Users/{username}/Library/Application Support/MarkLogic), you should see several xml files (assignments, clusters, databases, groups, hosts, server).

Whenever MarkLogic updates any of these files, it creates a backup using the same naming convention used for older ErrorLog files (_1, _2 etc). We recommend backing up all configuration files before following the steps under the next heading.

Process

1) Take a backup for each database in your cluster

2) Turn reindexing off for each database in your cluster

3) Starting with the node hosting your Security and Schemas forests, uninstall the current maintenance release MarkLogic version on your cluster, then install the latest maintenance release in that feature release (for example, if you're currently running version 10.0-2, you'll want to update to the latest available MarkLogic 10 maintenance release - at the time of this writing, it is 10.0-4).

4) Start up the host in your cluster hosting your Security and Schemas forests, then the remaining hosts in the cluster.

5) Access the Admin UI on the node hosting your Security and Schemas forests and accept the license agreement, either for just that host (Accept button) or for all of the hosts in the cluster (Accept for Cluster button). If you choose the Accept for Cluster button, a summary screen appears showing all of the hosts in the cluster. Click the Accept for Cluster button to confirm acceptance (all of the hosts must be started in order to accept for the cluster). If you accepted the license just for the one host in the previous step, you must go to all of the Admin Interface for all of the other hosts and accept the license for each host before each host can operate.

6) If you're upgrading across feature releases, you may now repeat steps #3-5 until you reach the desired feature and maintenance release on your cluster (for example, if trying to upgrade from MarkLogic 8 to MarkLogic 10,  after installing 8.0-latest, you'll repeat steps 3-5 for version 9.0-latest).

7) After you've finished upgrading across all the relevant feature releases, re-enable reindexing for each database in your cluster.

For more details, please go through Section  “Upgrading a Cluster to a New Maintenance Release of MarkLogic Server” of “Scalability, Availability, and Failover” guide.

If you've got database replication in place across both a master and replica cluster, then be aware that:

1) You do not need to break replication between the clusters

2) You should plan to upgrade both the master cluster and replica cluster. If you upgrade just the master, connectivity between the two clusters will stop due to different XDQP versions. 

3) If the Security database isn't replicated, then there shouldn't be anything special you need to do other than upgrade the two clusters.

4) If the security database is replicated, do the following:

  • Upgrade the Replica cluster and run the upgrade scripts. This will update the Replica's Security database to indicate that it is current. It will also do any necessary configuration upgrades.
  • Upgrade the Master cluster and run the upgrade scripts. This will update the Master's Security database to indicate that it is current. It will also do any necessary configuration upgrades.

For more here Updating Clusters Configured with Database Replication

Back-out Plan

MarkLogic does not support restoring a backup made on a newer version of MarkLogic Server onto an older version of MarkLogic Server. Your Back-out plan will need to take this into consideration.

See the section below for recommendations on how this should be handled.

Further reading

Backing out of your upgrade: steps to ensure you can downgrade in an emergency

Product release notes

The "Upgrade Support" section of the release notes.

All known incompatibilities between releases

The "Upgrading from previous releases" section of the documentation

MarkLogic Support Fixed Bug List

(14 vote(s))
Helpful
Not helpful

Comments (0)