Rolling Upgrade Process
You can upgrade your cluster with a minimal amount of transactional downtime (less than 5-10 minutes) without using the rolling upgrade feature. Consider whether the tradeoff in added complexity warrants using rolling upgrades instead of the regular upgrade process. See Upgrading from Previous Releases in the Installation Guide for information about the regular upgrade process.
Here are the steps in the rolling upgrade process:
Backup - back up any hosts that you are going to upgrade. See Backing Up and Restoring a Database for details.
Preparation - prepare any code or application that you may need to prior to the upgrade. See Interaction with Other MarkLogic Features for details.
Upgrade - perform the actual upgrade.
Cleanup
Before you start your upgrade, you will need to backup the hosts you are going to upgrade. Then do any preparation of code or applications that is necessary prior to the upgrade. See Interaction with Other MarkLogic Features for possible preparations.
When you have completed the upgrade, you may need to perform some clean up.