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.

In this topic

Determining whether or not you need to set up a new environment
Staging system requirements
Methods for setting up a staging system for upgrade
To disable DSO and escalations after you set up a staging system
To perform a fresh install of the current AR System server
To back up and restore the production database on the staging system
Where to go from here

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.

Reminder

If you do require new hardware, obtain BMC Remedy license keys for the new staging server host ID (if you do not have extra licenses).

Staging system requirements

Staging system	Requirements
Development staging Purpose Use the development system to test the platform and application upgrades and to reconcile application customizations (overlays). You will also apply fixes to the development environment that are uncovered in QA.	The upgrade tasks that you perform on this system do not require a copy of the production AR System database or the same capacity as the production AR System. Your application customizations should reflect what you have in production. If you want to utilize your existing development environment and database, then follow the steps for an in-place upgrade of the development system. For details, see the Remedy-ITSM-Suite-in-place-upgrade-process.
QA staging Purpose Use the QA system to test the upgrade of the platform components and applications with production data and fully test the upgraded environment. Best practice BMC highly recommends that you conduct full validation and performance testing in the QA environment to minimize the amount of time required for testing during the production staging upgrade. Reducing test time during the production phase will also reduce the amount of delta data that you need to migrate.	Your QA environment should be similar in size and capacity to your intended production system so you can conduct full validation and performance testing prior to the production staging upgrade. Create the same server group configuration as the production server.
Production staging Purpose Use the production staging system to import your reconciled application customizations, perform the final upgrade, and migrate the production delta data by using the Delta Data Migration tool. You will go live with this server, replacing the existing production system.	Ensure that the hardware for the staging production server meets the production server requirements. Create the same server group configuration as the production server.

Methods for setting up a staging system for upgrade

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

Option	Description	Tasks
Clone your production VM	Provision a new environment with the supported OS and database and clone your current production Remedy deployment and database to create the staging system.	After you clone the environment, immediately disable DSO and escalations. Proceed with the next step in the staged upgrade.
Reinstall the current version of the AR System server and replicate the AR System database	Set up a new environment with the supported OS and database and then perform a fresh install of your current AR System server. For example, if you are on version 8.1.02, you need to do a fresh install of that version, including any patches or hot fixes.	After you set up the new environment, install your current version of the AR System server (such as 8.1.02). Immediately disable DSO and escalations. Back up and restore the production database on the staging system. Proceed with the next step in the staged upgrade.

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):

Function	Setting	Server group considerations
DSO	DSO-Placeholder-Mode: F	For information on how to configure DSO for a server group, see Configuring DSO for a server group.
Escalations	Do one of the following: Set the shared Disable-Escalations-Global parameter value to T.	For server group considerations, see the Disable-Escalations-Global entry in Configuration settings C-D.

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:

Remedy version	Start page for the documentation
7.6.04	BMC Remedy Action Request System
8.0	BMC Remedy Action Request System
8.1	BMC Remedy Action Request System
9.0	BMC Remedy IT Service Management Deployment
9.1	BMC Remedy IT Service Management Deployment

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.

Note

If you are starting the production upgrade, immediately after this task, you will apply Restrictions after restoring the database on the upgrade server.

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.
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.
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.
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
On the upgrade server, shut down the BMC Remedy AR System server.
Work with the database administrator responsible for your production environment to restore the database onto the upgrade server database.
After restoring the database, start the BMC Remedy AR System server and ensure that the database parameters are set to the following values:
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.
Set the READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT to ON
Set the PARAMETERIZATION to SIMPLE.
For details, see Tuning-the-SQL-Server-database.
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
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.
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.
Restart the AR System server and verify that the system is functional.
Work with the database administrator responsible for your production environment to back up the upgrade server database.
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

Up to process	The next step varies, depending on whether or not you have just set up the development staging system, QA staging system, or the production staging system. For the next step, return to the Remedy-ITSM-Suite-staged-upgrade-process .