What Are You Waiting For?

Upgrade Strategies for ALUI

Bill BenacField Engineer – BID ConsultingBEA Systems

bbenac@bea.com

Agenda

1. My Background

2. Key Goals for Successful Upgrades

3. Upgrade Best Practices1. Have a good backout strategy 2. Reasonable scope3. Set up identical environments4. Create processes to streamline upgrade5. Have your extended team on call6. Be ready for config file overwrites 7. Check system health before making changes8. Have tests to validate each step9. Clean house before upgrade

4. Bonus Tips

5. Questions

My Background

Field Engineer in the West Region

Focus on Plumtree/ALUI since 2000

Ran customer beta program for G6

Performed upgrades at customers likeWeyerhaeuser, Cargill, DFAS & Boeing

My share of detours and epiphanies

Enjoy challenge of designing upgrade processes to reduce risk and increase efficiency.

Key Goals for Successful Upgrades

You want success on upgradenight, but what does that require?

Reduce (-):• decisions during upgrade

• errors

• risk

Increase (+): • predictability

• speed

• repeatability of steps

Create practices with these goals

What does this get us?

Have a good backout strategy

Practice: Think through a per-server and system-wide backout strategy in advance

Reason: Problems happen, and you want the resources for recovery planned before the high pressure settles in

Details:• Backup file systems

• Export registry

• Backup database

Example: We tried restoring from tape one night? It took forever since the system is just plain slow. Now though we zip up our ALUI directory before beginning. No stress, no pain, more time.

- Risk; + Speed

Reasonable scope

Practice: Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

Reason: An upgrade can be tricky enough on its own. Manage risk by leaving elective activities for the following week.

Details:• Wait to implement the full load balanced environment

• Wait to deploy new products, e.g. Pathways

• Wait to exercise new features, e.g. RSS feeds

• Wait to introduce a new portal audience

Example: One customers explained they wanted a flashy launch of their upgraded portal with new portal powers. But after discussion, they realized big dreams had big risk, and small successes still brought incremental PR gains.

- Risk

Set up identical environments

Practice: The test environment should be identical to prod.

Reason: Differences hide anomalies

Details: • Same set of components installed

• Same proxies, same load balancing, same customizations to IIS, etc

• Same portal configuration (URL Mappings, guest settings, connect to prod portlets)

Example: Recently we discovered only after an upgrade that portlets failed on ports higher than 32,767

- Risk

Create processes to streamline upgrade

Practice: Automate and script as much as you can of your upgrade.

Reason: Speed is valuable, mistakes are easy, decisions are uncertain, history can be important.

Details:• Use SQL commands to script database permission changes and portal object

changes (e.g. moving admin objects, fixing security, etc)• Use a batch file to install a CF (stop services, backup file, install new one, start

service).

• Use a batch file to copy back in your cssmill customizations from c:\bea\alui.pre.upgrade then to run cssmill and copy it to the image server

Example: Going to 6, crawler URLs needed slash removed. Going to MP1, extra effort to create processes reduced upgrade time by more than half.

See example of batch file for critical fix installation at http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/bbenac/archive/2008/04/simplify_instal.html

- Risk, Dec, Err; + Speed, Pred, Rep

Have your extended team on call

Practice: Have every member of the extended team on call during upgrade

Reason: You may encounter unexpected problems and need unplanned expertise to move forward

Details:• Your developers who wrote

customizations

• Your LDAP directory admin

• Your SSO admin

• Your data center admin

• BEA support

Example: One upgrade had issues with of a customized login DLL. We needed developer to tell us he had created an update.

- Risk; + Speed

Be ready for config file overwrites

Practice: Create copy of config files before upgrade

Reason: Upgrade overwritessome customizations.

Details: Copy d:\bea\alui to d:\bea\alui.pre.upgrade andto a central location with a good file comparison program

Example: The cssmill templates always get reset from your customizations. i18n files are overwritten, etc. Diff after upgrade.

- Risk

Check system health before making changes

Practice: Take 15 minutes to test the system before any upgrade to be sure it works

Reason: Problems may exist in the system, and you should know those aren't caused by the upgrade changes. Debugging before upgrade = low stressDebugging at night after upgrade = high stress

Details: • Try lots of portlets from different developers and

parts of your org.• Check search, count objects, and look at cluster nodes• Make sure automation service jobs are running• Test your various URLs, and experience definitions

Example: An SSO product was sending the wrong user IDs for some users. Found after upgrade, we spent extra time to be sure we weren’t cause.

- Risk; + Speed

Have tests to validate each step

Practice: Create simple tests to validate your work

Reason: With many servers and many steps, you want to make sure you don’t miss anything

Details:• SQL can validate upgrade script ran properly

• D:\alui>dir {install-logfile} checks timestamp is modified

• grep -1 {upgrade-value} {configfile} checks value in place

• Have validater role be a different person than upgrader

Example: Doubled upgrade time in one case because a server admin didn’t update web.config. Difficult debug. Now we validate it.

- Risk

See examples and more info at http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/bbenac/archive/2008/05/validate_your_w.html

Clean House Before Upgrade

Practice: Clean up admin hierarchy

Reason: You don’t want to spend time testing something that doesn’t belong in portal anyway

Details:• Obsolete portlets

• Jobs that haven’t run in many months

• Remote servers that aren’t used

• Content sources with no crawlers

• Crawlers with no cards

Example: This applies to most every upgrade I’ve seen. You’re probably a good example.

See this slide’s speaker notes for example queries to search for obsolete objects

+ Speed

Bonus Tips

In ALUI 6.5, you must rebuild the search index. Create this after an upgrade dry run before go-live.

Have your business users write and execute a 5 minute test plan for their content. It’s the best way to ensure they really test in advance.

Use BEA forums to read about issues other customers had and to seek additional ideas: http://forums.bea.com/forum.jspa?forumID=500000021

Take notes, since you’ll learn lessons with each upgrade that apply to your future upgrades.

Questions

We’ll do ourbest to answer your questions

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