Upgrading

This section describes the upgrade and migration options that are available from previous versions of BMC Discovery.

Upgrade and migration overview

To summarize the upgrade paths and outcomes:

Existing installations of BMC Discovery 11.1.x and earlier use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Existing installations of BMC Discovery 11.2 use CentOS 6 as their operating system.
New installations of BMC Discovery 11.3 use CentOS 7 as their operating system.
Any appliance upgraded to 11.3 runs on CentOS 6.
You cannot upgrade a CentOS 6 or RHEL 6 based appliance to CentOS 7; rather, you must migrate. Migration involves backing up the CentOS 6 or RHEL 6 based appliance (version 10.1.x to 11.3) and restoring to a new BMC Discovery 11.3 appliance running on CentOS 7.
You cannot upgrade a BMC Discovery 11.3 appliance running on CentOS 7 to an 11.3 appliance running on RHEL 7; rather, you must perform a new installation and then migrate your data. Migration involves backing up the CentOS 7 based appliance and restoring to a new BMC Discovery 11.3 appliance running on RHEL 7.

BMC Discovery 11.3.x is the last version of BMC Discovery to support CentOS 6.

Supported upgrade versions

You can upgrade to BMC Discovery 11.3 from the following versions of BMC Discovery:

10.1, 10.1.0.1, 10.1.0.2, 10.1.0.3, 10.1.0.4, and 10.1.0.5
10.2, 10.2.0.1, 10.2.0.2, 10.2.0.3, 10.2.0.4, 10.2.0.5, and 10.2.0.6
11.0, 11.0.0.1, 11.0.0.2, 11.0.0.3, and 11.0.0.4
11.1, 11.1.0.1, 11.1.0.2, 11.1.0.3, 11.1.0.5, and 11.1.0.6
11.2, 11.2.0.1, and 11.2.0.2
(11.2.0.3 was a proxy-only release that was not made generally available)

You can update to BMC Discovery 11.3.0.1 (patch 1) from the versions above, and the following versions of BMC Discovery:

10.1.0.6
10.2.0.7
11.0.0.5
11.1.0.7
11.2.0.4
11.3.0.0

The upgrade to BMC Discovery 11.3 patch 1 makes changes to the appliance certificates which require some configuration after installation. See Configuring after upgrade for more information.

You can upgrade to BMC Discovery 11.3.0.2 (patch 2) from the versions above, and the following version of BMC Discovery:

11.2.0.5
11.3.0.1

You can upgrade to BMC Discovery 11.3.0.3 (patch 3) from the versions above, and the following version of BMC Discovery

11.3.0.2

You can upgrade to BMC Discovery 11.3.0.4 (patch 4) from the versions above, and the following version of BMC Discovery

11.3.0.3

You can upgrade to BMC Discovery 11.3.0.5 (patch 5) from the versions above, and the following versions of BMC Discovery

11.2.0.6
11.3.0.4

You can upgrade to BMC Discovery 11.3.0.6 (patch 6) from the versions above.

You cannot upgrade a BMC Discovery 11.3 appliance running on CentOS 7 to an 11.3 appliance running on RHEL 7; rather, you must migrate. Migration involves backing up the CentOS 7 based appliance and restoring to a new BMC Discovery 11.3 patch 6 appliance running on RHEL 7.

Upgrading mixed clusters

Clusters can comprise a mix of members running on CentOS 6 and CentOS 7. You might get into this situation by upgrading a cluster to BMC Discovery 11.3 (all members would be running 11.3 on CentOS 6) and then adding a new member that is a new installation of 11.3 running on CentOS 7.

When you upgrade a cluster with mixed OS (6 and 7) members, you must upload the BMC Discovery (CentOS 6) and the BMC Discovery upgrade packages before you start the upgrade. The cluster manager applies the correct upgrade to the members.

OS upgrades for CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 are packaged separately and can be applied to the cluster together or one OS at a time.

BMC Discovery upgrades for CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 are packaged separately but must be applied at the same time.

CentOS 7 migration

New installations of BMC Discovery 11.3 run on CentOS 7 or from 11.3 patch 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. BMC Discovery 11.3 patch 6, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is a separately licensed release intended for customers whose organizations require particular certifications, such as Common Criteria Security Certification. You cannot upgrade a BMC Discovery 11.3 appliance running on CentOS 7 to an 11.3 appliance running on RHEL 7; rather, you must migrate. The various upgrade paths and more information on migration is provided in the upgrading section.

The upgrade to BMC Discovery 11.3 from 11.1 and earlier versions replaces Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 with CentOS 6.

The replacement of earlier OS versions with CentOS 7 ensures continued support for the appliance OS during its lifetime, and provides support for newer hardware where you choose to install on hardware. It also provides SMB 2 support, and the ability to run Apache 2.4. CentOS is an enterprise-class Linux platform that is derived from and aims to be functionally compatible with its upstream source, RHEL. This compatibility enables BMC to perform the same CentOS testing against the Red Hat 6 and 7 STIGs.

When applying OS upgrades to BMC Discovery 11.3, ensure that you download and apply the correct CentOS operating system upgrade.

Which OS am I using?

Click here to expand...

To determine whether your appliance is running on CentOS 6, CentOS 7, or RHEL 7, check the footer of any UI page. The BMC Discovery version number, build number, and OS version are provided on the bottom line.

Alternatively, from the command line, enter:

tideway@appliance01 ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release

For CentOS 6 the output begins:
CentOS release 6.x
For CentOS 7 the output begins:
CentOS Linux release 7.x
For RHEL 7 the output begins:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.x

See the following pages for a summary of user-facing OS-level changes from previous BMC Discovery releases:

OS migration considerations

If any disk changes were made to the existing appliance before the migration, such as moving the datastore to a separate disk, these changes must be repeated on the new appliance. Otherwise, the restore from the old appliance may fail because of insufficient disk space.

The following file locations can be changed if needed in the $TIDEWAY/etc/link.conf file:

core datastore files
datastore log files
backup archive files

This section contains the following topics: