A rolling upgrade from 0.96.x to 0.98.x works. The two versions are not binary compatible.

Additional steps are required to take advantage of some of the new features of 0.98.x, including cell visibility labels, cell ACLs, and transparent server side encryption. See the Chapter 8, Secure Apache HBase chapter of this guide for more information. Significant performance improvements include a change to the write ahead log threading model that provides higher transaction throughput under high load, reverse scanners, MapReduce over snapshot files, and striped compaction.

Clients and servers can run with 0.98.x and 0.96.x versions. However, applications may need to be recompiled due to changes in the Java API.