Zero-downtime upgrade for BMC Helix Innovation Suite and applications

BMC Helix Innovation Suite platform and service management applications such as BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Digital Workplace, BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog, and BMC Helix Business Workflows support zero-downtime upgrade.

Zero-downtime upgrade makes sure there is no downtime for your production system when BMC performs upgrade of your platform and applications. However, you might observe some issues intermittently, and you should avoid certain operations during the zero downtime upgrade.

Related topics

Known-and-corrected-issues

Important

You can continue with the transactional user operations during the platform and applications upgrade such as creating tickets, creating tickets through REST APIs, searching tickets, and searching knowledge articles.

During an upgrade, a notification message appears in the BMC Helix Innovation Studio to inform you that the upgrade is in progress.

Upgrade in progress.png

Limitations and cautions

You might encounter the following issues while an upgrade is in progress:

  • Network connections with AR System server might not work for some time.
  • You might experience slow performance.
  • You might observe the following issues intermittently once during platform restart for a short duration of time:
    • Session timeouts
    • UI errors
    • RSSO authentication failed error
    • 502 Bad Gateway
    • Invalid credentials
    • HTTP ERROR 404 Not Found

  • For on-premises customers, the current Mid Tier and Smart IT sessions will be disconnected when the Mid Tier and Smart IT pods restart.

    For SaaS subscribers, the current Mid Tier and Smart IT sessions will be disconnected when the Mid Tier and Smart IT pods restart if you are upgrading BMC Helix Innovation Suite from a version earlier than 23.3.03 hotfix 1.

If you experience these issues, you can perform a refresh or login to the system and retry the operation after some time.

Operations to be avoided during a zero-downtime upgrade

When the zero-downtime upgrade is in progress, make sure you avoid the following operations:

Components

Operations to be avoided

BMC Helix Innovation Suite platform, BMC Helix Innovation Studio applications, and BMC Helix ITSM applications

  • Performing any administrative operations
  • Deploying and undeploying applications or libraries
  • Creating any approval rules or process or changing any approval configuration
  • Running any utility that performs administrative operations
  • Changing configuration settings by using the Centralized Configuration console
  • Restarting the secondary servers
  • Performing any Action Request System administrative functions
  • Performing Server Information configurations any time during the upgrade process
  • Making any ranking changes
  • Creating any AR Object Workflows by using Service Level management (SLM) or Business Rule Engine
  • Using any connection that uses the TCP port such as updating forms, escalations, active links, and other objects in Developer Studio.

BMC Helix ITSM Foundation data

  • Accessing, loading, and searching Foundation data
  • Changing Foundation data and onboarding of any user, group, or company

Mid Tier

  • Preloading or synchronization of Mid Tier cache
  • Manually restarting Mid Tier
  • Accessing database log files from the Logs Management console

BMC Helix CMDB

  • Accessing the Atrium Core Console
  • Performing BMC Helix CMDB administrative operations

BMC Helix Innovation Studio

  • Accessing the BMC Helix Innovation Studio Workspace tab as an administrator user
  • Accessing the pages in the Administration tab of BMC Helix Innovation Studio
  • Creating and modifying the following definitions in BMC Helix Innovation Studio:
    • Records, Views, Processes, Rules
    • Associations, Named lists
    • Events, Event statistics, Web APIs
    • Documents 
    • Chatbots
    • Administration configurations
  • Running a process in the Manage processes page

BMC Helix Business Workflows

  • Configuring the following tasks:
    • Case Template Configuration changes that involve edits to dynamic data and task flow process change (Create, Update)
    • Task Template Configuration changes that involve edits to dynamic data and automated task process change (Create, Update)
  • Creating and editing an email custom process in an email configuration
  • Editing and copying a line of business view configuration

BMC Helix Digital Workplace

Accessing approval records, Service Request Definition (SRD) and SB approvals in BMC Helix Digital Workplace.

BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker

Changing the connector settings in BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker configuration

BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT

  • Refreshing server cache and metadata
  • Performing any customization
  • Restarting Smart IT during the entire upgrade process

BMC Service Request Management

  • Creating BMC Service Request Management objects such as processes
  • Importing and exporting Service Request Definitions

 

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