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TS 5.x to 6.x upgrade path w/ new hardware?

System

I was curious as to the best practice for upgrading. Our issue is this...the EOL for all our TS products happens this june, so we obviously have to upgrade. however, our servers also come off lease at that time and we need to move our IW instance to new hardware

1) would you upgrade to all the new versions on the old hardware then reimage the drives on the new hardware? OR
2) do fresh installs on the new hardware of the latest versions and import all data and settings?

im really not sure the best way to proceed, either way sounds messy.

also, the docs say i must upgrade to all the latest service packs for TS, OD, and DD before moving to the 6.x versions. is this correct? if the upgrade is a full install i dont see why this is necessary.

thanks in advance

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Adam Stoller

Not sure about the last part - but basically I would suggest getting the new hardware set up while you still have the old server working.
Do a fresh installation of 6.x on the new server, take a *copy* of the old backing store and put it on the new server (6.x will read a 5.5.2 backing store) - then spend time making sure you get all the customizations working on the new server - keeping track of *everything* you need to change.

When you're ready to cut-over, you take a new cut of the current production backing store, put it on the new server and repeat any of the modifications you had to do before (which is why you kept very good notes - right?)

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Bowker

I agree in principle with Fish -

Our 5.5.2 backing store is having some issues with size and we did a bad thing once (put 3500 files in one folder, whoops) and so we will be doing a migrate from one server to another when the time comes. It will also give us an opportunity to clean up some old branches/editions/... that we no longer use. It will also let us move one group of users at a time so training will be easier. We will be moving our "less technically challenged" / "less vocal" groups first.

The migration from 5.0 to 5.5 was pretty painful - it took a few months to get it done. Suggestion for you...Get all your user groups on-board with whatever plan you choose. Unless you change your DNS to point the old server name to the new box, you will have a communication issue to do bookmarks etc...

Dan Bowker
Northern Trust
Web Publishing Technology

Migrateduser

thanks fish...so with yer recommendation its really not even worth all the hassle to patch up my current versions since we will be doing a fresh install?

im just worried due to the enormity of the system and config spread throughout so many folders. yeah we have docs and all the files are archived in source control but its still such a customized setup.

by pulling over the backing store im assuming all the DCR data/DCTS/branches/etcs will appear in TS 6.5 via the gui?

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World of Warcraft — Illidan/Horde

Adam Stoller

All the DCRs will appear - but all the data-types will appear for ALL branches UNLESS you either adjust the branch regex's in your templating.cfg or enable the option in your templating.cfg to behave like it used to - i.e. change:
<templating>
to:
<templating prune-missing-files="t">

There's supposedly a performance hit in doing this - but I think in most cases the hit is pretty small, to the point of not being noticable.

I would suggest you budget a minimum of 1 week, and if possible more - to work on verifying all the existing customizations and making code changes where necessary. Also, I suggest you consider settling on either CCPro or CCStd as the UI to use initially, as that will have an effect on the customizations too (not all customizations work seamlessly in both UIs - in fact, I think it's reasonably safe to say that switching from 5.5.2 to 6.x CCPro is generally simpler [from a development stand-point] than switching to CCStd).

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Migrateduser

thanks for the help as always...that sounds like a good plan of attack. do you think the TS 6.5 admin class is worthwhile?

would u recommend the jump to 6.5 or would you stiuck with 6.0?

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World of Warcraft  Illidan/Horde

Adam Stoller

I think that if you can get the training (web-based or otherwise) it's generally worthwhile - even if it just tells you things you already know (in that respect, it acts as a confirmation of your beliefs/knowledge). If you can get to an actual class, and you have a good instructor - the advantage is that you can sometimes go *beyond* the curriculum to get a better sense of things that aren't covered (or at least not covered to the depth that you'd like) in the basic class.

If you are in the midst of planning an upgrade and you have the choice between 6.0, and 6.5 - I think I'd recommend going to 6.5 -- the caveat here being that I'm just starting a 5.5.2->6.5 upgrade and thus have no "real experience" to speak of. What I've seen of 6.5 seems fine (at least as good as 6.0) though.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

NathansDIS

A few gotchas I ran into during a 5.5.2 -> 6.X upgrade:

1. Branchs in available_templates.cfg are now case sensitive, they weren't case sensitive in 5.5.2. (we are on Windows 2000, not sure if this platform specific)
2. Differences in the perl version required some minor code changes; some perl modules had to be reinstalled.
3. The names of the TS related services(w2k) changed and required changes to custom scripts tasked with manipulating services.

Let me know if you have any other specific questions about your upgrade. Hope this helps.

-nathan
DIS

bullets.rptdesign

Migrateduser

good feedback guys i appreciate it...we wont be able to start the upgrade on our Development environment till march when our new hardware arrives.

so that means i have to upgrade/reconfigure both dev and prod in a span of 3 months before the EOL on june 30...that sounds plausible i hope

my co-worker is very interested about changes to OpenAPI from 5.x to 6.5...such as depreciated classes and requirements. also, is CCI url still supported with 6.5?

for prep im going to clean up our current TeamSite structure and read up on the docs.

-------------------
World of Warcraft — Illidan/Horde

jed

CCI links should be replaced with the new URL commands such as /iw-cc/<something>, although, a quick test on a dev box shows me that the old CCI commands still work. I tested with the following:
http://FOO/iw/webdesk/newdcr?area_path=/default/WORKAREA/draft&iw_tdt=suncom/product-overview

Who knows how long the old CCI URLs will work, so you are probably better off making the minor changes needed now.

As for openapi, your developers might want to migrate to cssdk which is a friendlier programming interface.

--
Jed Michnowicz
jedm@sun.com
Content Management Engineer
Sun Microsystems