Hi Scott,
We have a large "Custom-Only" installation – no ITSM or any other OOTB apps, thus – ARS only. I suggest not to skip the x or x.y major versions of the base AR System. The x.y.z minor versions generally do not have a notable design change on the DB – with the exception of 7.6.04, which introduced overlays (Don’t understand why BMC did not release this as a Major version???). This comes out of previous experience with having been called in to “fix” a number of failed upgrades in the past, amplified by a recent round of failed upgrade attempts. You could try to skip one or two of these versions – that’s up to you – YMMD – but no guarantees. You might be lucky when going directly from 7.0.1 to 8.1…. but I would not advise doing it to your Prod environment before doing some extensive testing on a duplicate test bed environment. We had the before-last round of upgrade attempts directly from 7.1.0 to 7.6.04 fail repeatedly on colleagues, a local support vendor and myself. We were desperate to get to a currently supported version of ARS, so I decided not to give up and find out why it fails….. Eventually got it sorted out safely using the steps I outlined before. We decided not to go to 8.0 or 8.1 as 7.6.04 is the last version that is shipped with the User Tool. Our user base are still making extensive use of the User tool and are reluctant to use Mid-Tier because of it’s lack of performance and because of the limitations it imposes on you as opposed to the User Tool. I would suggest using the ARS upgrade path with each of the versions I mentioned as I outlined it in my previous mail, (however you might want to upgrade to ARS 7.1.0 first), just to be on the safe side, because it is known to work that way. A single ARS Base upgrade does not take very long. We had a Saturday morning and afternoon change window to do the ARS Base upgrade from 7.1 to 7.6.04 SP5 and that was enough time to get it done. As far as the OOTB modules are concerned, I have not yet tried to use the 7.x ITSM modules on the 8.x AR Server, but logic dictates that it should still work if the 7.x ITSM libraries are still intact after the ARS upgrade, as the ARS API is backwards compatible. HTH. Best Regards, Theo From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Scott Hallenger Sent: 18 December 2014 18:41 To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: Help with upgrade path ** Theo.. was this an ARS upgrade only, or were you upgrading the whole ITSM suite. I'm looking into an upgrading of only my ARS 7.0.01 base, which has ITSM running on top of it, to to 8.1 or 7.6. We would leave the ITSM portion as is for now. Are you saying to do this we need to install every version of ARS until we get to 8.1.... On Monday, December 15, 2014 2:11 PM, Theo Fondse (GMail) <theo.fon...@gmail.com <mailto:theo.fon...@gmail.com> > wrote: ** Hi Carina, We upgraded our "Custom-Only" 7.1/10g/Slolaris server recently to 7.6.4/11g/RedHat. I always suggest NOT to skip a major version when doing an upgrade, due to the fact that BMC only supports the last 3 versions, and therefore, might not test their software during development for upgrades from unsupported versions at the time. (I seriously doubt that BMC would have tested a straight upgrade from 7.1 to 7.6.04 or much less 8.0 or 8.1, due to their version support policies). Before I started my current stint at the company where I am working now, they attempted an upgrade from 7.1 to 7.6.4 and failed several times. Even with the assistance of a local support partner, the upgrade failed and they eventually gave up. The solution to the problem later turned out to be that you should not skip any major versions and go through the installer logs to find out what went wrong if the installer fails. We found a caveat with some of the AR System forms and tables which had to be addressed manually before the upgrade in order to get the upgrade to work. I suggest the following steps which worked for us to do a successful upgrade (please test it first on a development/test environment before doing this on prod): 1. Back up the current DB (full DB export dump). 2. Export and delete all records from the AR System User Central File form. 3. Export and delete all records from the AR System User Preference form. 4. Temporary Disable Automatic Processes (performance tuning to make upgrade complete faster): Escalations Alerts Archive Log Files Server Events 5. Temporary Decrease Threads count (max 2 each) to enable faster re-caching during upgrade. 6. Shut Down AR System. 7. Verify that the Oracle 11g 64 bit client has been installed on the server and update the tnsnames file for this client. 8. Verify that at least java 1.6 32 and 64 bit has been installed. 9. Comment out Db-Character-Set: UTF-8 parameter in ar.conf file if using UTF-8. 10. Run the following script on Oracle (fix for SW00327170): CREATE TABLE SCHEMA_ARCHIVE_BACKUP AS SELECT SCHEMAID, ARCHIVEFROMFORM FROM SCHEMA_ARCHIVE; COMMIT; UPDATE SCHEMA_ARCHIVE SET ARCHIVEFROMFORM = NULL; COMMIT; ALTER TABLE SCHEMA_ARCHIVE MODIFY (ARCHIVEFROMFORM NUMBER (15)); COMMIT; UPDATE SCHEMA_ARCHIVE SET ARCHIVEFROMFORM = (SELECT ARCHIVEFROMFORM FROM SCHEMA_ARCHIVE_BACKUP WHERE SCHEMA_ARCHIVE_BACKUP.SCHEMAID = SCHEMA_ARCHIVE.SCHEMAID); COMMIT; ALTER TABLE SCHEMA_ARCHIVE MODIFY (ARCHIVEFROMFORM NOT NULL); 11. Upgrade to ARS 7.5.0 12. Upgrade to ARS 7.6.04 SP5 13. Upgrade to ARS 8.0 14. Upgrade to ARS 8.1 15. Restore original config for Escalations Alerts Archive Log Files Server Events Threads count 16. Import backed up records for the AR System User Central File form. 17. Import backed up records for the AR System User Preference form. HTH, Best Regards, Theo -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Grooms, Frederick W Sent: 12 December 2014 22:44 To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG <mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG> Subject: Re: Help with upgrade path My suggestion Take a backup of the Oracle 10g data and copy/restore it to the Oracle 12c (Your DBA could also do this with oracle DataPump). Install 8.1 on the new server against the copy/restored data. When installing it should ask you if you want to upgrade or start new in the database. Choose upgrade. (You do NOT need to have an existing set of ARS binaries on the new server to choose upgrade as this only refers to the database data) Fred -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [ <mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG> mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Carina Burns Sent: Friday, December 12, 2014 11:38 AM To: <mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG> arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Help with upgrade path Greetings!!! I am turning to you all for suggestions for an upgrade path for our ARS system. I've contacted BMC for advice, however our support contract level is Basic... which is also the adjective I would use to describe my current level of customer satisfaction. Has anyone gone from ARS 7.1 to 8.1? How did you do it? If you don't want to wade thru my specifics, kindly preface your reply with TLDR before you explain your upgrade method. The specifics: Our production set up is ARS 7.1 patch 11 / Midtier7.0.01 patch 5/ Apache Tomcat 5.027 / Crystal Reports XI running on WinSvr 2003 SP2 against an Oracle 10g last patch database on RedHat Enterprise 4.0 I had thought to step thru and upgrade to 7.6 and then to 8.1 but was advised after opening a support ticket that since we have custom forms only and are not using ITSM or any other BMC app, we could go straight to 8.1 from 7.1. The compatibility matrix lists the minimums but states that any newer versions are supported for OS and database. Since hardware only gets upgraded when bond money exists about every 5-7 years at our school district, I asked for the latest/greatest. I cleared my choices/plan with support but since it was going to take a while to get the servers, I closed the ticket saying I would open another once I had my gear. My new servers are virtual; a WinSvr2012 R2 and a Oracle Linux 6 box. I put Oracle 12c on as the database. I had thought to install ARS 7.1 as a "new install", delete the data, copy the production 10g AR schema over to the 12c user, then run 8.1 as an upgrade. That's essentially how I did it the last time and support confirmed that a number of people run their upgrades that way. But Oh-Oh! 7.1 is 32bit and doesn't want to install on my Win 64bit OS...Maybe both support and I missed that little hitch or perhaps I misunderstood. Anyhow, I opened a new ticket and asked if I could do the same thing but with 8.1 instead. In other words, install ARS 8.1 as a new install, delete the data, copy over the 10g AR schema to the 12c user, then run 8.1 again as an upgrade. Here are the answers I got back on my ticket (paraphrased): A) 7.1 isn't supported, B) I was free to experiment using the new install/delete data/move schema/run upgrade method but it may not work C) I can try to install 8.1 as new and use the Migrator to move over all my custom forms D) Contract professional services and pay BMC to help with my upgrade Option D isn't going to happen. So I am left with options B and C. The analyst on the first support ticket didn't think Migrator would be necessary since we aren't using ITSM. Thoughts on that (While I go read the migrator documentation)? Comments on option B? Thanks in advance! Carina _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at <http://www.arslist.org/> www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years" _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
