19.02 enhancements

The 19.02 release continues to use deployment packages for the upgrade of Service Request Management, Service Level Management, and the other ITSM applications from version 18.05 or 18.08. The use of deployment packages makes the ITSM applications upgrade process faster and can enable zero-downtime upgrades in some scenarios.

If you are upgrading to version 19.02 from earlier versions (for example, version 9.1), you must use the upgrade installers to upgrade to version 18.05 and then apply the deployment package.

The upgrades of Remedy AR System, CMDB, Smart IT, and Remedy Single Sign-On continue to be done via installers, directly to version 19.02.

Related topics

Downloading the installation files

Known and corrected issues

Release notes and notices

Additional Remedy ITSM 19.02 enhancements Open link

BMC Remedy Deployment enhancements

The following sections provide information about the enhancements in the 19.02 release.

Support for Java 11

Remedy platform and applications now support higher versions of Java and Remedy 19.02 release is certified to be compatible with Oracle Java 11. Due to changes in Oracle's Java release and support strategy, Remedy also supports OpenJDK 11. This allows you to stay on a free version of Java. Remedy does not support Java version 9 and 10 because these Java versions are not supported by Oracle. For more information, see Product announcements.

Similar to the earlier versions of Remedy, during installation of the Remedy AR System platform software, you can configure a compatible 64-bit Java software environment that is to be used by the Remedy environment.

Remedy 19.02 release also provides backward compatibility for applications that still use Java 8.

Package deployment enhancements

The Remedy 19.02 release provides the following enhancements for the Remedy package deployment capability.

Ability to install Remedy in multiple languages by using a deployment package

Remedy 19.02 release offers a more flexible approach of installing languages in Remedy. You can now add multiple languages by using a deployment package. The language packs for Remedy platform and applications are available for download from the Electronic Product Distribution (EPD) site.

For more information, see Applying a language deployment package.

Ability to simultaneously deploy a package across servers in a server group

You can now upgrade your environment by deploying a package simultaneously on several servers in a server group, by grouping the servers into a logical subset. Deploying a package simultaneously on the servers significantly reduces the time required for the upgrade.

To identify a group of servers as a logical subset of the server group, you must set the same ranking for the servers in the AR System Monitor form.

The following figure depicts the simultaneous deployment of packages in a server group.

For more information about running simultaneous deployment, see Simultaneously deploy a package across servers in a server group.

You can also perform a parallel rollback of a package on a logical subset of servers. For more information, see Parallel rollback.

Criteria for package rollback

The package rollback criteria prevent accidental rollback. The following conditions are applicable when rolling back a package:

By default, you can rollback a package within 48 hours of successful package deployment. You can set a maximum of 168 hours, within which you can rollback a package.
You can rollback only the last deployed package.
For example, when you deploy Remedy IT Service Management 18.08 and after that, you upgrade to Remedy IT Service Management 18.08.01 packages on your system, you can rollback the Remedy IT Service Management 18.08.01 package but not the Remedy IT Service Management 18.08 package.

For more information, see Validation for a package rollback.

Logging enabled by default when you import or deploy a package

BMC has now enabled the deployment operation related logs by default. The new ard2pdeploymentactivity.log log file captures API, filter, and SQL logs related to all deployment operations such as Deploy, Build, and Rollback automatically even if you have not enabled the logging in DEBUG mode. This helps collecting logs in a simplified way when any deployment related issue occurs. For more information, see Collecting logs to troubleshoot package deployment issues.

What else changed in this release

In this release, note the following significant changes in the product behavior:

Update	Product behavior in versions earlier than 19.02	Product behavior in version 19.02
The Change Password option on the Mid Tier Configuration Tool is removed.	The Change Password option allows you to change the password for the Mid Tier Configuration Tool.	You must have AR Server installed to use the Mid Tier Configuration Tool. You can change the password If you enable the Force Password Change On Login checkbox on the User form. For more information, see Changing password of the Mid Tier Configuration Tool
Compatibility of API with AR server	If encryption is applied to the AR server of a certain version, the APIs of version earlier than the current version of the AR server can communicate with the AR server.	If encryption is applied by installing either Performance Security or Premium Security to the AR server of version 19.02, the APIs of only the version 19.02 or later can communicate with the AR server of version 19.02. The APIs of version earlier than 19.02 cannot communicate with the AR server of version 19.02.
A new option called Disabling status history on CDM forms is added to the Atrium installer.	The status history data on CDM forms is deleted when you upgrade Atrium Core from version 7.6.04	The Disabling status history on CDM forms option enables you to preserve or delete the status history on CDM forms.

Version mapping

The external version number that is displayed on the installer screens and the product pages is 19.02.00. BMC uses version 9.1.07 for internal purposes.

BMC Remedy product version is displayed as 9.1.07 in the following files:

Component	Version
INI template files in the installer ZIP files	All the INI template files in the installer ZIP files specify the product version as 9.1.07. This is an internal version number used by BMC. The external version is 19.02.00. For example, the following INI file specifies the product version as 9.1.07: <<AR installer zip folder>>\Disk1\Utility\ARSystem-ini-template
Properties files	When you search for properties in the Config Check utility, each property displays two versions – internal and external. The internal version is 9.1.07 and the external version is 19.02.00.
armonitor	The AR Monitor and arfiledeployer version is displayed as 9.1.07.
arerror.log	The arerror.log file displays the AR System and AR Assignment Engine version as 9.1.07.