SAS Viya 4 - reinstall

[Nitrovski]

Hello,

I have a Viya 4 installation in the Azure cloud. Currently, it's deployed on the 2022.09 LTS version, and I'm not inclined to go through all the upgrade steps for the 2023.03 LTS version. Instead, I'd prefer to perform a clean installation. My first question is: Can I simply delete the Viya 4 namespace, create the same namespace again, and reinstall Viya 4? Will I lose data and models stored in NFS by doing this? Or is that data stored somewhere in PostgreSQL? I'm quite unclear about this.

Another option is to install a new environment separately and transfer everything from the old one. Can I easily do this using the Export API in Environment Manager? Is there a way to completely transfer everything from one Viya 4 instance to another?

Thank you for your advice!

[gwootton]

If you delete the Viya namespace then everything stored in persistent volumes would be lost, as those would be deleted with the namespace. This would include the PostgreSQL database if using an internal PostgreSQL instance. If using an external PostgreSQL instance though you would not be able to use your old database and it's content with a deployment of a different version. Any files stored in an NFS mounted path would not be lost.

Information on what can be transferred using the export tools (content and full-system migration) can be found here:

Migrating from the SAS Viya Platform
https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/sasadmincdc/v_043/calmigration/p1hub2gt380pjzn14ysly8mej6ua....