Planning an upgrade

Review this planning guide to plan the BMC Helix Service Management upgrade process.

Planning the upgrade environment

Review the planning decisions and related information to plan the upgraded environment.

Planning decision	Details
From which versions can I upgrade?	You can perform an upgrade of BMC Helix Service Management from version 21.3.x, 22.1.x, 23.3.x, or 25.1.01 to 25.2.01.
Do I need to upgrade BMC Helix Platform Common Services?	Yes. Review the system requirements to ensure that you upgrade to the supported version of BMC Helix Platform Common Services.
What is the recommended sizing guideline?	BMC publishes guidelines for hardware sizing based on a series of enterprise-scale tests to demonstrate the scalability and performance of the platform and the applications. To know more refer to Sizing and scalability.

Review the planning decisions and related information in the table to plan the upgrade scope and decide whether to deploy new components.

Planning decision	Details
Can I upgrade just the platform or application components?	Independent upgrade of the platform or application components is not supported.
Can I upgrade just the applications?	No. You must upgrade the platform to upgrade the applications.

Review the planning activities in this section to understand the activities that you must perform before upgrading BMC Helix Service Management:

Planning decision	Details
What are the pre-requisites for an upgrade?	BMC Helix Service Management uses the BMC Helix Platform Common Services. Before performing the BMC Helix Service Management installation, you must upgrade the BMC Helix Platform Common Services.
What preparations are required for an upgrade?	See Preparing for upgrade.
Where do I find the installation files and container images?	The upgrade artifacts are available on the BMC Electronic Product Distribution (EPD) site. The container images are hosted on BMC Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) containers.bmc.com. You can download the files from the EPD site. The files include the following artifacts: Git repositories and artifacts used for upgrade Container images access key to access the container images hosted on BMC DTR You do not need to download the container images.