Upgrade issues with the Data ONTAP 8.2 release family

You must understand and resolve any known technical issues before you upgrade your storage system to Data ONTAP 8.2 and later releases.

This topic summarizes significant issues known at publication time. Be sure to check the "Important Cautions" section in the latest Release Notes for your target Data ONTAP release to see a complete list of issues that could affect the upgrade.

• Starting with Data ONTAP 8.2.1, there is a change in how Data ONTAP handles file names containing UTF-16 supplementary characters that you must be aware of if your environment uses such file names.
• After you upgrade to Data ONTAP 8.2, the license-list-info ZAPI is no longer supported.

  As a result, you must install Data ONTAP management software versions that are supported by Data ONTAP 8.2 or later.

• During a Data ONTAP upgrade, LUNs are assigned new revision numbers.

  Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012 interpret the LUNs with new revision numbers as new disks and set them offline after a host reboot; this status is shown in Windows management interfaces after the upgrade. Windows Server 2003 ignores LUN revision numbers.

• Stale deduplication-related metadata can exist in the FlexVol volumes and aggregates on your system, resulting in slow deduplication processing or your systems running out of space.

  Your systems can experience this problem if you are upgrading from a Data ONTAP 8.1 release prior to 8.1.2P4, if deduplication is enabled on any FlexVol volume, and if a FlexVol volume or the associated aggregate is more than 70 percent full.

• Starting with Data ONTAP 8.2, all license keys are 28 characters in length.

  Licenses installed prior to Data ONTAP 8.2 continue to work after you upgrade to Data ONTAP 8.2 or later. However, if you need to reinstall a license when you are running Data ONTAP 8.2 or later, the old key is not accepted.

• Starting with Data ONTAP 8.2, a baseline SP firmware image is packaged with the Data ONTAP image.

  By default, the SP automatic update functionality is enabled. You have the option to manually trigger an SP update.

• Starting with Data ONTAP 8.1.2, the software install or upgrade includes new disk shelf firmware versions for DS14mk2 AT and DS4243 disk shelves that provide enhanced disk error detection and prediction capabilities.

  Therefore, after upgrading to this version of Data ONTAP, you might experience an increase in the number of disk failures for certain disk shelf and disk models.

• If you have deployed synchronous SnapMirror in Data ONTAP 8.1.x for 7-Mode, upgrading to Data ONTAP 8.2 can cause performance degradation.

  To avoid this issue, you should remain in Data ONTAP 8.1.x.

• 3210 and 3140 storage systems with Flash Cache modules are not supported in Data ONTAP 8.2 and later 8.2.x releases operating in 7-Mode.

  You cannot upgrade to Data ONTAP 8.2 or later 8.2.x releases if you have Flash Cache modules enabled in your 3210 or 3140 system.

• If you are upgrading to Data ONTAP 8.2 release from a release earlier than Data ONTAP 8.1 release, you must perform an intermediate upgrade.

  During the intermediate upgrade, if you modify the state of deduplication on a volume, then a storage system disruption may occur.

• After an HA failover and giveback, the CIFS protocol might take several minutes to start up.

  If vFiler units are present, they might not be initialized for the duration of the CIFS startup time. The delay in CIFS startup is typically due to network infrastructure issues related to domain controllers and LDAP servers.