question Re: CDH downgrade from 5.5 to 5.3 in Archives of Support Questions (Read Only)

CDH downgrade from 5.5 to 5.3

mstepanov — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 10:10:35 GMT

Hi,

Does somebody happen to know whether CDH can be downgraded from 5.5.x to 5.3/5.4?

I tried to use old parcel but then HDFS namenodes fails to start due to "Unexpected version of storage directory .../dfs/nn".

Also I found the post https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Cloudera-Manager-Installation/Downgrade-Procedure/td-p/25430 where it was said that Cloudera didn't support downgrade operations. But maybe somebody met (un)official instructions how to do it manually?

Thank you in advance!

Re: CDH downgrade from 5.5 to 5.3

cjervis — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 13:53:48 GMT

Out of curiosity, why do you want to downgrade? Perhaps there is another way to reach your overall goal.

Re: CDH downgrade from 5.5 to 5.3

mstepanov — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 14:07:39 GMT

I'm going to upgrade production cluster so would like to have a possibility to restore old CDH in case of some critical issues. Cluster is located on hardware servers so I cannot use snapshots.

Re: CDH downgrade from 5.5 to 5.3

Clint — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 15:10:58 GMT

@mstepanov here's the background, if I remember correctly:

1) the reason rollbacks can be impossible in certain circumstances in HDFS is because sometimes the metadata is changed between versions in non-backward-compatible ways. Basically the namenode's fsimage and each HDFS block in the cluster get re-encoded with new bits of metadata that weren't available and therefore have no meaning in the older CDH version.

2) we don't always update the HDFS metadata in non-backward compatible ways between releases, but when we do it's usually major releases (eg. CDH4 to CDH5).

3) If no HDFS metadata changes were made between your original and upgraded version, rollback is possible in limited fashion.

4) Even if metadata changes were made, you can still rollback IF you haven't finalized the upgrade yet. See this doc for rollback procedures between CDH5 and CDH4.

Your best bet is to have a solid upgrade plan and test it thoroughly (UAT, QA, and regression) in a similarly configured staging environment prior to upgrade.

Re: CDH downgrade from 5.5 to 5.3

mstepanov — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 09:50:05 GMT

Clint, thank you for this information!