Planning an upgrade

Good planning allows your upgrade to run as smoothly and quickly as possible, and helps you to avoid retracing your steps. When preparing for your upgrade, you will need to consider how long each step will take and when users need to be logged off the system so that you can schedule each phase of your upgrade.

Step 1: Identify the upgrade resources

Make sure that you have access to the following resources

• Service Manager tools: The utilities you will use most during the upgrade process include Database Manager and Forms Designer.
• Documentation resources: See the Service Manager9.61 Help Center for client/server installation instructions and Service Manager knowledge.
• Micro Focus Software Support: The Micro Focus Software Support web site has operating system and compatibility information, product documentation, and release notes.

Step 2: Meet the software requirements

Before you start your upgrade, make sure that you meet the following Service Manager system requirements:

• Your RDBMS version, operating system, and client/server environment must meet all criteria listed in the Support Matrix for the target version. See the Service Manager Support Matrices to review the Support Matrix.

• To directly upgrade your existing applications to Service Manager9.61, your existing Service Manager applications release level must be one of the following:

  • Service Manager 9.3x without Process Designer installed
  • Service Manager 9.31 or later with Process Designer Content Pack 9.30.2 or 9.30.3 installed
  • Service Manager 9.4x Classic, Codeless, or Hybrid
  • Service Manager 9.5x Codeless, or Hybrid
• The Service Manager server process (sm) must have read-write access to the database.

Backups

It is highly recommended, at a minimum, that you back up the database at the following strategic points in the upgrade lifecycle:

• After applying an upgrade
• After resolving conflicts

NFS-mounted partitions

Do not install either Service Manager or the Service Manager Upgrade Utility on an NFS-mounted remote partition. This can cause serious performance degradation. The performance of an NFS-mounted partition drops significantly if it reads data in many small pieces instead of one large chunk. Service Manager generates a lot of database read/write activity. An NFS-mounted partition is significantly slower than a local drive when running the Upgrade Utility process.

Step 3: Perform a system health check

A well-maintained production system is the easiest to upgrade. Before starting the upgrade process, perform all regular maintenance on your production system. If necessary, contact Customer Support for recommended actions. Suspend all customization activity on the production system.

Step 4: Create development and test environments

Plan to have at least two copies of your existing production environment:

• A development system that mirrors your current production environment. Use the development system to run the out-of-box upgrade and build a custom upgrade.
• A test system that mirrors your current production environment. Apply the custom upgrade on the test system and verify it there.

Step 5: Develop an upgrade strategy

In standard Service Manager terminology:

• Customization refers to changes to RAD applications.
• Tailoring refers to changes made by using Service Manager tailoring tools, such as Forms Designer and Format Control.
• Configuration refers to local settings (for example, in your environment records and the system information record).

The upgrade process affects different parts of the Service Manager system. Besides upgrading the standard Service Manager applications, an upgrade affects the RDBMS where Service Manager is running and any customized files or RAD applications. For more information, see How does customization affect the upgrade process?.

Tailored systems

A list of tailored files can help you resolve differences quickly between your existing files and new files. You can also use the SQL Compare utility to determine how dbdict files differ.

To list all upgrade files, click Tailoring > Differential Upgrade > Patch Records. Select UPGRADE in the drop-down list and then press Enter.

RDBMS-mapped systems

Because Service Manager tables (data files) must be mapped to an RDBMS, you must choose one of the following options before beginning the upgrade:

• Allow the Upgrade Utility to modify your RDBMS tables for you.
• Use SQL Compare utility to generate dbdict difference report and manually update the RDBMS databases before beginning the upgrade process.

The upgrade can affect certain mappings and tables. Contact your database administrator for assistance and to discuss the impact on the RDBMS.

Localized systems

You can upgrade a localized system with the Upgrade Utility. Before you begin to upgrade a localized system, ensure that you have the correct language pack for the language to which you will be upgrading. For more information and instructions on how to install the language pack, refer to Install language packs. The Upgrade Utility detects the presence of a localized system and runs the upgrade just as it would for an English system. You will have to make any customization and tailoring changes, based on the requirements described in this document for each of your system configurations.

Customized RAD applications and ScriptLibrary records

A list of customized RAD applications and ScriptLibrary records and the extent of the customization is useful. If it is not available, the programmer who made the changes may be able to supply information. Or, you may need to run a comparison between the existing applications or script and the new version.

Step 6: Meet database requirements

Before upgrading your system, verify that your system is pointing to the correct database.

Convert all tables and fields from lowercase to uppercase

Service Manager does not generate lowercase table names or field names. Therefore, if your database is case sensitive, you must convert all tables and fields from lowercase to uppercase before you can upgrade the server and client or applications.