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When to revert and when to call technical support

You can downgrade or revert without assistance when downgrading or reverting new or test clusters, but you should call technical support if you encounter problems during or after upgrade, or if you want to downgrade or revert a production cluster.

To downgrade means to change to an earlier version of ONTAP within the same major release for example, to move from ONTAP 9.5P4 to ONTAP 9.5 P1. To revert means to change from a major release of ONTAP to an earlier major release, for example, to move from ONTAP 9.8 to ONTAP 9.7.

You can downgrade or revert to an allowed ONTAP release without assistance from technical support only in the following scenarios:

  • You upgraded to a new release on a test cluster and you want to return to the original release when testing is completed.

  • You are configuring a new cluster—running a later release of ONTAP and not yet in production—in an environment in which you have standardized on an earlier ONTAP release.

If the upgrade fails, do not attempt to revert ONTAP in a production environment without assistance. If you encounter any of the following circumstances, contact technical support immediately:

  • The upgrade process fails and cannot finish.

  • The upgrade process finishes, but the cluster is unusable in a production environment.

  • The upgrade process finishes and the cluster goes into production, but you are not satisfied with its behavior.

  • The upgrade process finishes for some but not all of the nodes, and you decide that you want to revert.

If you created volumes in ONTAP 9.5 or later and you need to revert to an earlier version, contact technical support to confirm if any of the volumes use adaptive compression. Volumes using adaptive compression must be uncompressed before reverting.