Upgrade Considerations

Existing OSVs are unaffected. Object Storage Volumes created before storage class support was introduced have no storage class field and are treated as Standard class. No migration or reconfiguration is required on upgrade.

The archive-object-volumes Volume Group is present by default. The Volume Group is created with the system, with an empty membership expression. Adding a GIR OSV does not create the group; the OSV becomes a member of the group that is already there. If no GIR OSV exists, the group remains present and empty.

Mixed-version clusters. Sites that do not support storage class can participate in a cluster that uses a GIR SOSV but will not enforce GIR mobility and replication guardrails. If you require uniform GIR behavior across all sites, upgrade all sites to a release that supports storage class before introducing GIR SOSVs.

OSV identity file versioning. The OSV identity file (hs_osv_details, in the bucket root) is updated to record the storage class. The file also includes a feature version indicator that allows newer Hammerspace versions to refuse to join a shared OSV when the bucket’s identity file was created by a version too far ahead of the local site’s version. This safeguard prevents version incompatibility errors from silently degrading GIR behavior.