Cloudera Docs

Assessing the Impact of an Upgrade

Understanding the impact of an upgrade.

Plan for a sufficient maintenance window to perform an upgrade. Depending on which components you are upgrading, the number of hosts in your cluster, and the type of hardware, you might need up to a full day to upgrade your cluster. Before you begin the upgrade, you need to gather some information; these steps are also detailed in the upgrade procedures.

There are three types of upgrades: major, minor, and maintenance:
Major Upgrades
Major upgrades include the following:
  • From Cloudera Manager 5.x and CDH 5.x to Cloudera Manager and Cloudera Runtime 7.1.1 or higher
  • From Cloudera Manager and Cloudera Runtime 7.0.3 to Cloudera Manager and Cloudera Runtime 7.1.1 (CDP Private Cloud Base)
  • From Cloudera Manager 6.x to Cloudera Manager 7.1.1
A major upgrade typically has the following characteristics:
  • Large changes to functionality and update of Hadoop to a more recent version
  • Incompatible changes in data formats
  • Significant changes and additions to the user interface in Cloudera Manager
  • Database schema changes for Cloudera Manager that are automatically handled by the upgrade process
  • Significant down time is required to upgrade the cluster.
  • Client Configurations are redeployed.
Minor Upgrades
Minor upgrades upgrade your software to a higher minor version of a major release—for example from version 7.1.0 to version 7.2.0—and typically include the following:
  • New functionality
  • Bug fixes
  • Potential database schema changes for Cloudera Manager that are handled automatically
  • Client Configurations are redeployed.
Incompatible changes or changes to data formats are generally not introduced in minor upgrades.
Maintenance Upgrades

Maintenance upgrades fix critical bugs or address security issues. The version numbers for maintenance releases differ only in the third digit, for example, when upgrading from version 7.1.3 to 7.1.4.

To upgrade to a maintenance release, you only need to perform a subset of the Minor version upgrade steps. Follow the same procedures as for minor version upgrades but skip the steps that are labeled as follows: