How to downgrade GemFire Disk stores from a higher version to a lower version

Products

• VMware Tanzu Gemfire

Issue/Introduction

Downgrading GemFire Disk stores from a higher version to a lower version is generally not possible. However, this article describes a method to accomplish this goal.

GemFire does not support downgrades. Therefore, downgrading may cause issues with GemFire membership and GemFire members not starting.

Environment

Product Version: 9.10

Resolution

While attempting to downgrade GemFire versions, a GemFire locator or server may log the following error message:

Caused by: org.apache.geode.cache.DiskAccessException: For DiskStore: pdx-disk-store: Unknown version ordinal 116 found when recovering Oplogs, caused by org.apache.geode.cache.UnsupportedVersionException: Peer or client version with ordinal 116 not supported. Highest known version is 1.10.0

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.Oplog.readProductVersionRecord(Oplog.java:2080)

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.Oplog.readGemfireVersionRecord(Oplog.java:2037)

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.Oplog.recoverDrf(Oplog.java:1512)

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.PersistentOplogSet.recoverOplogs(PersistentOplogSet.java:462)

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.PersistentOplogSet.recoverRegionsThatAreReady(PersistentOplogSet.java:379)

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.DiskStoreImpl.recoverRegionsThatAreReady(DiskStoreImpl.java:2076)

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.DiskStoreImpl.initializeIfNeeded(DiskStoreImpl.java:2064)

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.DiskStoreImpl.doInitialRecovery(DiskStoreImpl.java:2069)

...

... 16 more

Caused by: org.apache.geode.cache.UnsupportedVersionException: Peer or client version with ordinal 116 not supported. Highest known version is 1.10.0

at org.apache.geode.internal.Version.fromOrdinal(Version.java:323)

at org.apache.geode.internal.cache.Oplog.readProductVersionRecord(Oplog.java:2076)

... 28 more

GemFire does not support downgrades. However, we can go back to a previous (lower) version by using the following procedure. 

Note: This process requires that you have either exported data or made a backup prior to doing the upgrade [1] [2}.

• Remove all the persistent files from the GemFire (server / locator) members.
• Then, either:
  • Restore from the backup taken from the desired version [1] or
  • Import the data that is exported from the desired version [3].
   

1. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-GemFire/10.1/gf/managing-disk_storage-backup_restore_disk_store.html
2. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-GemFire/10.1/gf/tools_modules-gfsh-command-pages-export.html#topic_263B70069BFC4A7185F86B3272011734
3. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-GemFire/10.1/gf/tools_modules-gfsh-command-pages-import.html#import-data