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Prerequisites to planning an upgrade or migration

Depending on the environment and whether you are upgrading or migrating, you will install new components as part of an upgrade or migration. The components to be installed, the number of instances, and where they must be installed are dependent on your overall plans and the environment.

Prerequisites to planning

For a successful upgrade or migration, review the Deployment-use-cases-and-best-practices before planning and attempting an upgrade or migration. As you review this information, it is imperative that you consider the following:

  • The current environment and related functionality
  • Existing functionality you expect to maintain during the implementation of Infrastructure Management 10.0
  • Existing data that must be moved forward into Infrastructure Management 10.0
  • Existing data that is not required to move forward into Infrastructure Management (that is, old data that may not be valuable)
  • How you expect the environment to function after the implementation of Infrastructure Management 10.0
Important

There are significant improvements in the architecture, monitoring configuration and administration capabilities in Infrastructure Management 10.0. To facilitate these improvements, you must upgrade the BMC PATROL Agent for all scenarios. The PATROL Agent upgrade and change in architecture imparts a significant impact to the overall upgrade/migration processes. BMC has designed a lot of backward compatibility in the solution components where possible to help ease the upgrade/migration processes. However, it is imperative that you fully understand Infrastructure Management 10.0 and work though the upgrade/migration processes in a development and QA environment and document the plan for your environment. Every detail must be covered including validation of configuration policies for each KM. For more information, see Presentation-Server-Infrastructure-Management-and-PATROL-Agent-compatibility-matrices and List-of-Monitoring-Solutions-and-KMs-in-Operations-Management.

Best practices, caveats, and limitations

This section covers basic upgrade and migration methods identified as best practices. The information here does not cover all Infrastructure Management components. For example, BMC TrueSight Operations Management Reporting is not included. This section also does not include all possible technical options; however, major options are covered. Although Infrastructure Management is very flexible and can be implemented in multiple ways, this section follows best practice recommendations. 

The following lists contains best practices to follow when upgrading to Infrastructure Management 10.0.

  • Do not upgrade all agents en masse. Work in blocks or groups of agents.
  • Do not try to use Bii4Px with 9.6 PATROL Agents for extended periods of time.
  • Do not use Bii4Px with Notification Servers. Instead, implement the 9.6 PATROL Agent on the Notification Servers and leverage the new architecture until you are able to upgrade the entire environment. This assumes that you are already using Notification Servers.
  • As you upgrade to 9.6 PATROL Agents, you must fully leverage the new architecture and its capabilities. Plan for this and have the Infrastructure Management 10.0 infrastructure in place as part of the upgrade or migration so that you are not forcing the 9.6 PATROL Agents to function in the older architecture. 
  • If the scheduled down time is configured for auto-synchronized devices that are monitored by agents prior to 9.5, or for groups having auto-synchronized instances, data is not recorded during the down time period for the associated auto-synchronized instances. If the scheduled down time is in the future and the upgrade is completed before the scheduled down time period starts (including upgrading the PATROL Agents to 9.6), then instances monitored by the related PATROL Agents are converted to streamed instances and the scheduled down time will not be applicable to the related devices anymore.
  • You must manually create corresponding blackouts for scheduled down time settings that were previously created manually in the older system.
  • If Infrastructure Management is integrated with BMC Remedy IT Service Management Change Management, the Change Management settings need to be deleted and recreated in IT Service Management so that the corresponding blackouts are created automatically in Infrastructure Management 10.0.
  • A 10.0 Integration Service can be used with non-PATROL data adapters and native collectors. Adapters used to collect non-PATROL data are included in Infrastructure Management 10.0 and supported with 10.0 Integration Services. These include BMC Portal, TM ART, and so on.
  • Be sure to review port numbers in the Infrastructure Management 10.0 documentation. Some ports are no longer used or are used differently due to architecture changes.
  • A BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server upgrade fails to install if extra event management components have been installed on the existing BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server. No extra event management cells, adapters or any other non BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server components must be installed on a BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server other than a PATROL Agent for local/external monitoring.
  • The BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server upgrade process writes a lot of data and creates directories in the existing BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server installation directory. Make sure you allocate extra disk space for the upgrade. Allocate at least the amount required for a new installation.
  • On Linux and UNIX systems, if the existing BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server installation directory is a mount point, you may have problems associated with the upgrade process when attempting to rename directories. Allocate a directory for the existing environment that is not a mount point.
  • Ensure that all host names and host aliases are resolved in DNS before attempting an upgrade or a migration. In some environments where the existing event management cell HA configuration leverages virtual host names instead of physical host names, the installer does not recognize the virtual or alias host names.
  • You cannot upgrade the Infrastructure Management 10.0 beta version (pre-GA releases) to the Infrastructure Management 10.0 GA version. You must install a new server and Integration Service nodes, or upgrade an older release that is supported with upgrades.
  • Do not attempt to connect PATROL Agents prior to 9.5 to an 10.0 Integration Service.
  • If possible, avoid using Bii4P3 or Bii4P7 with 9.6 PATROL Agents. (However they will work and have been tested.)  Use the new architecture capabilities in Infrastructure Management 10.0. The only exception to this recommendation is if you are upgrading the PATROL Agents first, before implementing the 10.0 BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server(s) and 10.0 Integration Service host(s). Even in that scenario, it is better to forward events directly to an event management cell and avoid using Bii4P3 or Bii4P7 if possible.
  • You must move to the 10.0 architecture and processes as completely as possible and avoid a mix-match of old/new technology. Avoid configuring the new technology to support the old technology; otherwise you will not move away from the old and realize the benefits of the new. There may be some overlap during the upgrade and migration processes, but this must be reduced as much as possible. Note the following.
  • A PATROL Agent prior to version 9.5 cannot send events directly to the 10.0 Integration Service process.
  • A 9.0+ PATROL Agent can send events to a 9.6 event management cell.
  • A PATROL Agent prior to version 9.0 cannot send events directly to an event management cell. If you have 9.0 agents, you must already be sending events to a cell until you upgrade the agents to 9.6.
  • If you have PATROL Agents prior to version 9.0 and you are not using a PATROL Notification Server, continue leveraging Bii4Px and the first tier cell that the events flow into, until you upgrade the agents to 9.6.
  • As you upgrade all the PATROL Agents to 9.6, you must configure them to send events directly to the 10.0 Integration Service process.
  • Decommission all instances of Bii4P3, Bii4P7, and the Notification Servers after all the PATROL Agents are upgraded to 9.6.
  • You cannot upgrade a BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server with a Sybase database to a BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server with an Oracle database or the other way round. There is also no way to migrate a Infrastructure Management Sybase database to an Oracle instance or the other way around.
  • Upgrading an HA-configured BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server environment requires a two-part upgrade: one on the primary node and the other on the secondary node.

Related topics

Benefits-and-risks-to-upgrades-and-migrations

Migration-versus-upgrade-decision-chart

Upgrade-process-overview

Migration-process-overview

 

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