Guidelines for upgrading

The purpose of this topic is to ensure that you choose the correct path for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management upgrades. If you do not adhere to these guidelines prior to an upgrade, a successful upgrade cannot be warranted and can impact BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management functionality as a whole.

This topic includes:

Customized BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management stacks should adhere to the guidelines for customizing.

Important

BMC recommends that you first upgrade your test or development (pre-production) environments. Do not upgrade your production environment directly. When you upgrade your pre-production environments, it helps you estimate factors such as downtime, custom configurations and so on required for your production environment upgrade.

What is not supported for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management upgrades

BMC does not support any action that is performed on a BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management stack that BMC has not certified for quality. Non-compliance with the following guidelines can lead to failure of the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management upgrade.

The following actions are not supported for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management upgrades:

Using an Install Planner instance that was used in the past to install or upgrade BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.
Using the Staging approach to upgrade BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.
Upgrading BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management components without fixing existing inconsistencies reported by the Data Consistency Checker.
Upgrading BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management that has inconsistent customizations (for example, performing a customization on base forms instead of overlays).
Performing activity on any BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management component database during a BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management upgrade.
Migrating BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management components from http to https while performing the upgrade.
Adding or scaling of high availability (HA) nodes to components during the upgrade.
Having multiple components on the same machines in a small or medium deployment.
Upgrading where customizations have been retrofitted or disrupted the continuity of supported customizations (for example, customizations to the UI, BMC Remedy AR System, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, TrueSight Orchestration, and TrueSight Server Automation).
Upgrading the production BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management environment without also upgrading the QA environment.
Installing or upgrading without administrator user and database access.
Using untested, minor Java versions in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management components.
Installing across operating systems (for example, a Windows/Linux combination).
Migrating OS versions of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management components during the upgrade.
Reconfiguring the network or pod during an upgrade.

What is supported for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management upgrades

BMC supports an upgrade path for which the Support and Services teams are well-trained, and BMC has tested the upgrade activities. The following actions are supported for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management upgrades:

Using standalone installers to upgrade BMC products required for the solution.
Using the BMC Cloud Lifecyle Management installer for integrating with products upgraded using standalone installers and then upgrading other cloud components. (The installer uses only the in-place approach to upgrade.)
Upgrading existing components in high availability (HA) nodes.

For a list of known issues for Cloud Lifecycle Management upgrades, see Known-and-corrected-issues.

Upgrading 4.6.07 to 4.7.xx

Attribute	Downtime required
Data Consistency Checker inconsistency fixes	Yes
BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management component upgrade	Yes
Apply customizations	Depends on use cases to be verified
User acceptance testing	Depends on use cases to be verified
Third-party integrations	Depends on use cases to be verified

Where to go from here

Upgrade-considerations