Preparing for upgrade

This section describes the precautions you must take, the tasks you must perform when preparing to upgrade your system, and the procedure to download the upgrade files.

Before you begin

Before you upgrade, make sure that:

You create a backup of the appliance or cluster.
If you have made changes to OS configuration files on the appliance, you must verify and reapply the changes as required post-upgrade. The changes that you made might have been overwritten by the upgrade process.
You backup your database because the BMC Discovery upgrade process performs an upgrade of the database. You can restore a pre-11.3 backup to an 11.3 appliance.
The location used by the upgrade for temporary files must be readable by the tideway user. The default location (which is created if it does not exist) is /usr/tideway/tmp, and can be changed using the command line option --tmpdir.
To upload the upgrade archive using the UI, you must have sufficient space in /tmp, approximately 1.6 GB.
You are a user with admin security privileges, such as the system user.
If you have multiple standalone BMC Discovery installations each syncing to the CMDB, and you converting these standalone installations to a cluster, ensure that you read Converting BMC Discovery standalone machines to a cluster.

Upgrade archive naming conventions

The upgrade archive files are available from the BMC Electronic Product Distribution (EPD) site. To help you locate the files easily, the Product Name column lists the label name of the product. For example, BMC Discovery. Click the + sign next to it to expand and view the available downloads. Locate your required product version, operating system, and version, such as BMC Discovery 11.3.0.6 CentOS 6. When you click this product label name, the relevant upgrade archive file is ready for download. Select Save File and then click OK.

The product upgrade archive file uses a .tgz file extension, while the compressed OS upgrade archive uses the .sh.gz file extension. The downloadable file uses the following file naming convention:

For product upgrades:
ADDM_Upgrade_Vn_nnnnnn_CentOSv_ga.tgzWhere Vn is the BMC Discovery version number to which you are upgrading to and nnnnnn is the build number, and CentOSv is CentOS6 or CentOS7.
For OS upgrades, the downloadable file name is:ADDM_OS_Upgrade_CentOS_64_v.yy.mm.dd_nnnnnn_ga.sh.gz
Where v is the CentOS version number, and yy.mm.dd is the date of the last package update from CentOS and nnnnnn is the build number.

To download the upgrade files

From the BMC Electronic Product Distribution (EPD) site, download the compressed upgrade archive.
You must follow specific file naming conventions for the compressed archive files. For more information, see upgrade archive naming conventions.
Upload the upgrade archive to the /usr/tideway/var/upgrade directory on on the standalone machine or any machine in the cluster.
If you are using a browser that supports HTML5, you can upload the archive using the upgrade UI.
Note

To upload the upgrade archive using the UI, you must have sufficient space in /tmp, approximately 1.6 GB.

Upgrade considerations

When you run the upgrade, the timezone you specified is overwritten and reset to Europe/London unless you have updated the timezone. For information about how to configure the timezone, see Localizing the appliance.
You can re-run the upgrade if it is terminated or fails. Destructive actions are recorded and are skipped on subsequent upgrade runs. Consequently when an upgrade is re-run, it is usually significantly quicker. You are unlikely to need to run the upgrade more than once, as it would only be required if an upgrade fails. See also the tw_run_upgrade command to re-run an upgrade.
The synchronization mechanism has changed in 10.2 and later, to reduce the amount of querying performed on the CMDB. As a result, if you are upgrading from 10.1.x it is necessary to resynchronize a connection that existed prior to the upgrade. See Resyncing a CMDB Connection for more information.
Where an upgrade makes changes to syncmapping files (see Default CDM Mapping and Syncmapping block), the initial CMDB syncs after upgrade might result in longer reconciliation times. Examples of such changes are key changes or attribute changes on a CMDB CI.
Where SQL and JDBC credentials are in use, their existing properties files continue to be used and updated properties files are installed but not used. Where such credentials are unused, the old properties files are replaced with the latest.
In BMC Discovery 11.0, where an external CI with no kind is promoted to shared or contained is synchronized, its key is updated incorrectly. This was fixed in version 11.1 and later releases. When upgrading from BMC Discovery version 11.0, you will see some churn in the CMDB as CIs with incorrect keys are deleted and replaced by CIs with correctly generated keys. This is most frequently seen for BMC_SoftwareServer CIs that are shared between other BMC_SoftwareServer CIs.

Approach to upgrading consolidating systems

If you are upgrading a scanning appliance you may have to also upgrade the consolidation appliance. Version 10.x, 11.0, 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3 scanning appliances can consolidate to version 11.3 consolidating appliances. However, version 11.3 scanners cannot consolidate to earlier consolidating appliances. Once you have upgraded your consolidating appliances, you can then upgrade scanning appliances as required. You must upgrade all your appliances eventually.

When a system uses consolidation, we recommend the following approach in upgrading BMC Discovery:

Stop discovery on scanning appliances.
Ensure that all consolidation operations are complete.
Stop discovery on consolidating appliances.
Upgrade consolidating appliances.
Restart discovery on the consolidating appliances.
Restart discovery on the scanning appliances.
Upgrade scanning appliances as required.

Where to go from here

Performing the upgrade