Preparing to upgrade the core components

Before starting the installation program to upgrade the core components, review some of the personnel requirements, action items, and upgrade considerations.

Personnel requirements

During this procedure, the following personnel should be available:

• Database administrator.
• Systems administrator.
• User with authority and permissions to perform an upgrade on service machines.

Preupgrade activities

During an upgrade the standard views and templates, that might include modifications, are overwritten.

• To retain any of your modifications to the BMC-provided templates, physical views, triggers and actions, ensure that they are saved under new names.
  

  Best Practice

  If you modified any default existing elements (such as event templates, history templates, policies, reports, and views), these changes are likely to be overwritten during the upgrade process.

  To avoid possible loss of work, BMC recommends that you backup any such modified elements using the mqsexport command.  After the upgrade, you can restore your modified versions using the mqsimport command.

  To mitigate this situation, make copies of default elements, and make any changes to the copy, leaving the original intact. The copied versions are not overwritten during an upgrade.

   
  Any views and templates that you created are not overwritten in the upgrade and do not need to be backed up or restored for the upgrade. They should be backed up during routine backup procedures.

  
  

• If the Application Service has been configured to run in secure mode, then some care must be taken when upgrading.

1. 1. Locate and record the location of the SSL security certificate and passwords for the SSL security certificates in the jetty/qpas.xml file in a section that looks like the following:
      
<Call name="addConnector">
<Arg>
<New class="org.mortbay.jetty.security.SslSocketConnector">
<Set name="port">
<SystemProperty name="jetty.secure_port" default="15004"/>
</Set>
<Set name="maxIdleTime">0</Set>
<Set name="Keystore">
<SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/webapps/localhost.jks
</Set>
<Set name="Password">OBF:1i131ldq1ifl1lyv1jld1jm51lzb1iel1lds1i0n</Set>
<Set name="KeyPassword">OBF:1i131ldq1ifl1lyv1jld1jm51lzb1iel1lds1i0n</Set>
<Set name="protocol">SSLv3</Set>
</New>
</Arg>
</Call>
   2. The security certificate path appears in the name="Keystore" XML node, and the passwords (2 of them) appear in the name="Password" and name="KeyPassword" nodes. Note that the text <SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/> is replaced by a path to the TMTM jetty directory when the file is read in.
   3. Be sure you have a copy of the security certificate keystore file indicated by the path. The upgrade process overwrites the default jetty/webapps/localhost.jks file. If this file path was used to specify the custom security certificate keystore, it is overwritten.

Contact BMC Support for additional backup/restore information and for information about whether views and templates from one version of the product are supported by another version.

Upgrade considerations

• If you modified any default existing elements (such as event templates, history templates, policies, reports, and views), these changes are likely to be overwritten during the upgrade process.

  To avoid possible loss of work, BMC recommends that you backup any such modified elements using the mqsexport command.  After the upgrade, you can restore your modified versions using the mqsimport command.

  To mitigate this situation, make copies of default elements, and make any changes to the copy, leaving the original intact. The copied versions are not overwritten during an upgrade.

  
  
• During the upgrade outages occur for various functionalities of the product. Prior to each set of steps the outages expected are specified. You should read through the full set of upgrade instructions so you can coordinate the people needed and minimize outages.
• You might encounter file names prefixed with MQSoftware. This is normal and reflects older product and file names.

Where to go from here

Follow the instructions for downloading the product from the Electronic Product Download website, as described in Downloading the installation files.

Also download any Fix Packs - download the latest agent and server Fix Packs from the Electronic Product Download website. Review the readme of the Fix Packs to determine if there are any special instructions that override the documentation and when they should be applied for a new installation. The latest Fix Pack information can be viewed under Release notes and notices.

Perform the upgrade of the core components.