Setting up systems for a staged upgrade

Before you start a staged upgrade, you set up staging systems that are clones of your current Remedy systems.

If you need to upgrade the environment, acquire the hardware or VM, set up the database management system, and replicate your current AR System server and database on that upgrade system.

Determining whether or not you need to set up a new environment

If you have not already done so during upgrade planning, review the recommended Hardware and database sizing requirements for your deployment to determine whether or not you need to upgrade the database management system or the hardware, including any primary servers and secondary servers in a server group.

Staging system requirements

Methods for setting up a staging system for upgrade

You can use one of the following methods to set up a staging system:

To disable DSO and escalations after you set up a staging system 

Immediately after you set up a staging system, set the values for the following parameters in either Centralized configuration  (version 9.0.x or later) or ar.cfg or ar.conf  (versions prior to 9.0):

If the parameters do not exist, add them manually.

To perform a fresh install of the current AR System server

Download the appropriate installers from EPD. For information on how to access EPD, you can follow the procedure in Downloading the installation files. If you need instructions for installing the prior version, see the following documentation:

To back up and restore the production database on the staging system

After you install the prior version of the AR System server, backup up and restore the current production database to the staging system. 

1. Before you backup and freeze the system, reconcile your configuration items in BMC Atrium CMDB. For details, see Reconciling data .

   If upgrading from version 7.6.04 against your existing database, delete all the entries for GUID AI005056B5170D5P4XTA1qFVCQmg4A from the SHARE:Application_Properties form, and install the target version of BMC Atrium Integrator server.

2. Work with the database administrator responsible for your production environment to create a full backup of the current production BMC Remedy AR System database. Ensure that your Database Administrator retains all statistics and indexes in the backup.

3. If you are taking this backup to restore the database to the production staging system, back up the current production database after your scheduled jobs or bulk update processes, such as reconciliation and integration updates, are complete. 

   Note

   Record the date and time of the backup. You will need this information in the delta data migration (DDM) planning step to determine which data needs to migrate to the upgrade server at the end of the upgrade process.

4. Take a backup of your transformation jobs (.ktr and .kjb files) and config files (ar.cfg and armonitor.cfg (WIndows) or ar.conf and armonitor.conf (UNIX)). The transformation jobs are exported from the production server to the staging server. See  Migrating Atrium Integrator jobs and transformations from one computer to another

5. On the upgrade server, shut down the BMC Remedy AR System server.
6. Work with the database administrator responsible for your production environment to restore the database onto the upgrade server database.

7. After restoring the database, start the BMC Remedy AR System server and ensure that the database parameters are set to the following values:

   Oracle

   Set cursor_sharing in DB to EXACT and in the VM clone of your production environment specify the value in the ar.cfg (ar.config) file of each server in server group. 
   Set the _b_tree_bitmap_plans to FALSE in the database.

   For Oracle server configuration details, see Tuning the Oracle database server. 

   Microsoft SQL

   Set the READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT to ON

   Set the PARAMETERIZATION to SIMPLE.

   For details, see Tuning the SQL Server database.

8. Delete all rows from the following tables:

    Click here to expand the list of tables

   • servgrp_board

   • ft_pending  

   • AR_System_Server_Group_Operations_Ranking 

   • Application_Pending 

   • Distributed_Pending 

   • SYS_Action 

   • CAI_Events 

   • RE_Job_Runs 

   • NE_JobRun 

   • UDM_CartePending

9. If you are running the SQL server, run the following command on your database:
   
   sp_changedbowner "ARAdmin"
   
   Replace ARAdmin with the appropriate BMC Remedy AR System database administrator account.
10. Change the AR System server name in the database to match the new host for both primary and secondary servers. 
    For more information, see  Changing a server name when using a duplicated or migrated environment  in BMC Remedy AR System documentation. For more information on changing the server name of BMC Remedy AR System server for version 9.0 and later, see  Renaming the AR System server . 
11. Restart the AR System server and verify that the system is functional.
12. Work with the database administrator responsible for your production environment to back up the upgrade server database.

13. Run the BMC Remedy AR System database consistency checker. 
    For more information, see  Running the database consistency checker  in BMC Remedy AR System documentation.

Where to go from here