How to install and enable new release in Prod without outage

[Peter Heggie]

Running the hostid script on AIX returns a different value after installing a new release (e.g. CIS2022.09).

Our plan was – after sufficient testing in our Test environment – to failover production interfaces to our Test server and run the new release installation on our Prod server. Then fail back to Prod.

The problem is that we can’t request our Prod license keys until the software is installed. Then Infor takes time to return the license.dat file, it could be four hours or maybe two days. So we can’t just failover to Test, install on Prod server and then fail back to Prod, all within 30 minutes.

So we may have to keep our Prod interfaces failed over on Test until we get the license keys back.

How do other shops deal with the license key issue?

Similar question for the GUI client – do you install the new release Windows client on your desktop to access Test, and use the Portable Client to access Prod, just until you upgrade Production?

Thanks,

Peter

Peter Heggie

Topic

[Tim Pancost]

Hey Peter,
You can actually get the hostid without installing the entire release. In the Download Center, for each version, there is a Cloverleaf Integration Services HCIHostID “product” that you can download. This allows you to get the host id for that version. Just download it, unzip it, and SFTP/SCP/dragdrop the appropriate platform’s executable to the machine you want to get it for, and voila.

Alternately, you could also just install the new version on your production machine. You can have more than one version resident at the same time, assuming you have space.

Same thing goes for the GUI, you can have more than one version on your desktop at the same time.

HTH,
TIM

Tim Pancost
Trinity Health

[Peter Heggie]

I did download the hostid software and installed it. I should have taken screen shots but I’m pretty sure I ran the uploaded software for the hostid before the new release install and after the new release install and received different values for the hostid. I will verify this when we update our production server. But I’m pretty sure that we got a new hostid after installing the new release so that makes applying license keys tricky. I will update this post when we do the production server update to verify the behavior.

When we install the new release, it changes the /etc/environment file so that the default environment is the new release and we have to set the environment variables to match the release we want to work with. I realize we have some work to do to run the correct version of interfaces. So maybe we will install the new versino in production, but then change the /etc/environment file to point back to 19.1 until we get our license keys.

Right now our 19.1 GUI client cannot connect to the 2022.09 host server, so we will have to use multiple clients or a client and a portable client. I hope we can do multiple clients; I’m not sure because the client install is not on our D drive and our C drive seems to live in Amazon (we have Amazon desktops) and we don’t have access to the C drive. I think in the past we had multiple releases of Cloverleaf clients on our C drive. I will look  into that as well.

Thank you

Peter Heggie

[James Cobane]

We have normally installed the upgraded version to our production server in advance of the actual cutover, since as Tim pointed out, you can have mutliple versions of Cloverleaf co-existing.  Additionally, with the use of the “portable client”, you can have differing clients on your workstations so you can connect to the differing versions.

With the advance install of the new version to our production server we are then positioned to perform the ‘site promotions’ ahead of the actual cutover and then simply  shutdown the old version and bring up the new version at the time of cutover.

We normally implement a “change freeze” in advance of promoting the sites so that no changes are made in the old version once we have promoted the sites to the new version.  Once we cut-over then the “freeze” is lifted and life can go on.

 

Hope that helps.

Jim Cobane – Henry Ford Health

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by James Cobane.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by James Cobane.

[Tim Pancost]

We do our upgrades just as Jim(Hey, Jim!) outlined; install the new version, initiate a production freeze, “upgrade” the production sites, shut down the old version sites, and bring up the new version sites.  We have a couple days of freeze before doing the shutdown/bring up piece.

I also set up environment variables, oldroot and newroot, and then just setroot to which one I want to be working in(e.g. setroot $oldroot) for that session.

For the /etc/environment thing, yes, you can either change it back after the install(remembering to change it back-back once you go-live with the new version), or leave it as-is, and remember to setroot to the old version when you login to command line. That can be a little complicated if you have batch jobs that use setroot, in that case you’d probably want to do the update of /etc/environment after installation.  But you can still use the environment variables to pop back and forth between versions.

Have never used the portable client.  We just install the new client on our laptops along with the old client, they can coexist just as easily as the server side can.  Just have to be sure what icon you’re double-clicking on, they don’t really look too different, if at all, between versions. 😀  Although it seems like Peter might have some limitations on what he can install locally.

Tim Pancost
Trinity Health

[Author]

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