There are three classifications of Bright “versions”:
Major versions, minor versions, and release numbers. These are defined below.
A major version has a number associated with it. For example: Bright 5 or Bright 9.
A minor release has a number after the decimal point. For example: Bright 8.1, or Bright 9.0
A release number is a version number followed by a hyphen. These are incremented and available after sufficient changes have been made in the packages of a minor release. For example, 8.0-30, 8.2-20, or 9.0-5
Upgrades are differentiated from updates. Minor versions can be updated to a newer release number regularly via YUM/apt/zypper within the same minor version.
Upgrades are possible between minor versions AND major versions by following appropriate upgrade procedures. For example: 8.2 to 9.0 or 9.0 to 9.1
Some of the appropriate procedures for these operations are posted in the KB:
Upgrading to 8.2 from 7.x
Upgrading to 9.0 from 7.x, 8.x
Upgrading to 9.1 from 8.x and 9.0(forthcoming, Q1 2021)
If you have questions, please contact the support team if you have specific questions.
Please note that release numbers are not used as official Bright release names! The official release naming scheme uses the minor release as the version name. (e.g., 9.0 or 8.2) Release numbers are labels of convenience for snapshots of the current production release and include cluster manager packages that have gone through QA. Only the latest of a specific release is available for download at any time.
Performing an update will update all packages to the revisions of these packages contained in the highest release number. However, it is also possible to update just certain packages if there is a good reason to do so.
For example, one would use ‘yum update bright-view’ to just update the Bright View (and some related) packages. For this reason, it is not possible to state that a cluster is “at release number X”, because installed packages may be coming from various releases. This also means that it is not possible to check what release number a cluster is at. A good way to get a rough idea of which release a cluster is using is to compare the revision number of the installed cmdaemon package to the file-lists of various releases. These file lists are publically available at the customer portal under “Release Notes” on the left side menu.
While not an officially supported method, the revision number of an ISO release can be revealed by:
1. Mount the iso mount -o loop /path/to/bright.iso /mnt
2. List the data/packages directory:ls /mnt/data/packages/
3. One of the sub-directories will have a name similar to :/mnt/data/packages/9.0-10
Here, 10 is the release number.
As always, if you have questions, feel free to contact the support team if you have specific questions.