How to open a PROACTIVE case for upgrading RHV

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

Red Hat Virtualization 4.x

Issue

  • Planning to upgrade the production Red Hat Virtualization cluster.
  • How to open a case to notify Red Hat of upgrades taking place so appropriate resources are available?
  • What information is useful for Red Hat support when opening a proactive case for the weekend or after working hours?

Resolution

Introduction - what is a Proactive Case?

Proactive cases are a way for Premium customers to provide an advance notice to Red Hat Support of planned upgrades, migrations, patching, or any other maintenance activity. Typically, these events happen outside regular business hours.
Having prior knowledge of the planned activity provides Red Hat with an opportunity to ensure the right information is made available to better prepare technical support should you encounter an issue.

Note: New installations do not entitle a Proactive Case, as they do not fit with the Severity Level Definitions for Severity 1. For issues encountered during new installations, please open a regular Support Case.

Prerequisites

  • The account must have an active Premium Virtualization subscription.
  • It is recommended to submit Proactive Cases several days before the activity is scheduled to begin (preferably 7-14 days in advance), in order to allocate appropriate resources for the upcoming event.
    • If the activity requires weekend coverage, the Proactive Case must be submitted at least 4 business days before the upcoming activity (by close of the business day, for example on the Tuesday prior to the upcoming activity).
    • Note: Weekend Proactive Cases submitted less than 4 business days before the activity will be considered "Late Entry", and treated through normal Follow the Sun workflow. For such, Red Hat will not be able to guarantee that the appropriate resources would be staffed for the weekend.
  • In order to allocate the most appropriate engineer from different teams, no matter where they may be worldwide, Proactive Support Cases are conducted in the English language only.
  • It is recommended to familiarize yourself with the Reference Guide for Engaging with Red Hat Support article, which provides best practices for engaging Red Hat Support.
  • If you have a Technical Account Manager (TAM), a Solution Architect (SA), or a Customer Success Manager (CSM) - please engage them when planning a Proactive Case.

Opening a Proactive Support Case

First, prepare all relevant details for the upcoming event that will help communicate what changes and activities are taking place, then Open a This content is not included.Support Case and provide the required information in the following manner:

  • Case Title - should be prefixed with "[Proactive]" and should summarize the change.
    • Example:
[PROACTIVE] Production/Integration/Development RHV cluster upgrade from 4.X to 4.Y
  • Severity - open the case on a Severity level of 3. When the activity begins the Severity will be raised to 1 by Red Hat engineers so that the proper resources be allocated if an issue arises.
  • Case Description - describe as many details as possible, for example:
    • Environment
    • Applications/services that may be affected by the upgrade
    • Patches being applied
    • Infrastructure
    • System/s involved
    • Any integrations with third-party software
    • Other components being involved
  • Date / Time of Event - state the planned start and end date/time of the maintenance window duration with the timezone (preferably referencing the offset from UTC).
  • Contact Information - provide the primary and secondary contact name, email addresses and phone number with country and region code. This is especially important if the person who opened the case is not the person doing the maintenance activity.
  • Data Attachments - upload the relevant data from the systems which will be affected by the activity. Refer to the next section for detailed data requirements per product.

Data to attach to the Proactive Case

  • Upload a Log Collector of the RHV-Manager before any upgrade work is performed.
    • If there are only a few systems affected by the activity, please attach their respective Log Collections to the case. Otherwise, please provide one or two as an example and keep the rest locally.
  • Another useful tool to get information about the environment is rhv-log-collector-analyzer. Please refer to the official documentation for installation and instructions.
  • After you generate the below report and upload it to the Proactive Case to verify some of the following pre-upgrade checks:
    • There are no virtual machines pinned.
    • Machines with cluster level >= 3.6.
    • No pending tasks in the Engine.
    • No virtual machines with invalid images status.
    • No virtual machines with IN PREVIEW snapshots
    • No custom iptables rules detected.

Example of a Proactive Case:

  • Case Title:

     [PROACTIVE] - planned RHV upgrading

  • Case Description:

    Greetings Red Hat Support.
We are planning to upgrade our Red Hat Virtualization servers from version 4.3.11 to 4.4.6 and we require standby support until we finish the procedure.


  Maintenance Window Information:
   - Date - Tuesday, May 15th - 16th
   - Time frame - 4.5 hours
   - Timezone - Moscow Time (UTC+03:00)
   - Start Time - May 15th, 21:00 UTC+03:00
   - End Time - May 16th, 01:30 UTC+03:00
 
  Primary Contact Information:
   - Name: Jane Doe
   - Email: jane.doe@example.com
   - Phone: +1-123-456-7890
   
  Secondary Contact Information:
  - Name: John Doe
  - Email: john.doe@example.com
  - Phone: +1-123-456-7891

  • Case Attachments:

    sosreport-LogCollector.tar.xz
SBR
Product(s)
Category

This solution is part of Red Hat’s fast-track publication program, providing a huge library of solutions that Red Hat engineers have created while supporting our customers. To give you the knowledge you need the instant it becomes available, these articles may be presented in a raw and unedited form.