Upgrade or Repair Server

Aerospike supports upgrading a cluster without service downtime or data loss, through a rolling upgrade. That is, you stop one server node at a time, upgrade and restart it, as described below. During this process, the database cluster continues to serve traffic, and does not experience a loss of data availability.

Caution

Refer to the Special Upgrade instructions page for important upgrade information relevant to specific versions.

You can use a rolling upgrade to:

• Upgrade Aerospike Database from one version to another.
• Upgrade Hardware or replace failed hardware.

Before upgrading, review the release notes to learn of changes in the targeted version, and any special considerations you should be aware of.

Estimating the Time Required for an Upgrade

Aerospike Database handles large volumes of data, so upgrades involve a period of time for each server node to restart, and for the cluster to rebalance data across the nodes. It is difficult to estimate how much time an upgrade will take.

Some situations to watch for:

• If your configuration/situation allows for a fast restart, the server restart typically only takes a few minutes. For example, if you want to install a new software version on your cluster, it should be a matter of a few minutes to take down a server, install new software and then do a fast restart.
• If you install a new SSD drive, refer to the knowledge base article How to add, replace and remove disks.
• If a server is down for a long time (more than an hour), the re-balancing process (migrations) will take longer.
• You are unable to ship XDR records with compression enabled from Aerospike Database 4.8. or later to Aerospike Database 4.3.1 or earlier. See Upgrade Database 4.3.x or earlier to avoid XDR compression errors with Database 4.8.x or later