Nagios Support Forum

Hello Forum Folks,

I am looking for guidance as to how to best do an upgrade and migration. We want to move our production Nagios XI 5.5.4 environment from an OVA installation to a newly installed Nagios XI 5.7.3 manual installation on a RHEL 7.8 server.

I understand that the standard backup/restore process requires the exact same version on source and target so that won't work, but if I were to first upgrade the OVA installed server to 5.7.3 I would like to know if there would be any issues with a backup/restore to a non-OVA installation?

Because we currently only have the one production server in our environment I would much rather not touch the current (prod) 5.7.3 system and simply migrate the configuration to mirror the old and new servers, ensure everything is running fine, and then make the new server production server. (After that we will use backup/restore to create a new stand-by/DR server at the same level.)

I'm still new to Nagios and I'm finding it a bit confusing to dig through internet resources on this topic because they often aren't clear whether they are referring to XI or only Core, and if there are any version specific dependencies.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Scott McCambly

As long as you stay to the same exact XI version you should be fine.

That will work just fine if you upgrade your old one first (based on the OVA), then back it up, and restore it to the new non-OVA system.

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf

Just make sure that if you have a ramdisk setup on your old system that you install it on your new system after installing XI and before restoring:

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... giosXI.pdf

Make sure that you follow the After the Restore section of the backup/restore guide above and run the restore_repair script from it as well so that your binaries can be recompiled.

Hello,

Thanks for your reply, however I have a couple more concerns/questions.

As we are not yet set up to have a stand-by environment I was hoping to leave the current prod server unaffected, but if upgrading it first to the latest level is the proper path then so be it. I still am not clear on how to do this however, as this server is an OVA installation that was later moved offline.

Your offline installation guide documentation states: This guide is directed towards Nagios XI administrators interested in installing Nagios XI onto systems potentially isolated from the internet or with other internal access only restrictions. This procedure is NOT intended to upgrade a system that was originally installed online or started as a pre-created VM and then moved offline.

I am also not comforted by the statement above: The procedure in this document is currently in BETA phase, we do not guarantee these for production at this point, as we are still doing some final internal testing.

So the backup/restore procedure is well documented, but I would like to get confirmation on the supported procedure for upgrading our Nagios XI 5.5.4 OVA installation now that it is in an offline environment.

Again, many thanks.
-Scott

As long as you meet the requirement of only backing up and restoring to the same exact XI version you don't technically need to upgrade your old one first, you would just need to install the same exact XI version on the new system before restoring to it, then upgrade to new one to the latest.

The only way to upgrade a OVA/source install that has been moved offline would be for you to mount the repositories up via DVD, create local yum repositories that it does have access to, by granting temporary online access so that it can reach out and update through the repositories, or by migrating it to an offline system. Regardless, whether using a OVA/source install or using the offline install the install/upgrade requires the system has access to the base repositories for the OS (whether they be mounted up by DVD, you setting up local repositories that it can access, or by granting temporary internet access). See the prerequisites from this guide for the offline install (it can be done offline but it still needs access to the base repos to install packages from the OS vendor):

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... onment.pdf

You can also migrate your OVA/source install to an offline install by using the backup/restore process by spinning up a new server, installing XI through the offline install (needs to be same XI version as the backup contains), and then backup the old and restore to the new.

If you have any questions/issues, let us know.