Upgrading from 5.2.1 to 5.6 – Test plan

[Mark McDaid]

Hello all,

We are getting ready to upgrade to 5.6 and I am seeking any advice or tips any of you may have as far as developing a test plan.  This will be my first upgrade and I want it to go as smoothly as possible.  I’ve searched through the forums for info and this is what I’ve come up with so far (we are running 5.2.1 on Windows 2000 and so we will be upgrading the OS to Windows 2003 for 5.6):

1. Install Windows 2003 and CL 5.6 on test server.

2. Capture live data from production inbound threads on production server via SMAT files.

3. Make a copy of the production site on the production server and modify each of the inbound and outbound threads so that they are file protocol and not tcp/ip.  Take the individual SMAT files of live data and run them each through the corresponding thread on the modified copy of production in order to obtain outbound files for each thread.

4. Move the modified copy of production site over to test server with CL 5.6 installed.

5. Again, take the individual SMAT files of live data and run them each through the corresponding thread on the modified copy of production in order to obtain outbound files for each thread.

6. File compare the 5.2.1 outbound files with the 5.6 outbound files to ensure consistency

Would this be a valid test? Would this method guarantee a smooth transition when the switch is made to the new server? What other items should I consider? I’d really be interested in hearing about any of your experiences in upgrading, especially any gotchas I might need to be aware of.

Topic

[Max Drown (Infor)]

That exactly what we did.

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[Russ Ross]

Here is a quick thought about what else to consider when switching production to a new cloverleaf server with a different IP than the old box.

If some of your interfaces don’t connect or don’t get ACKed on the new cloverleaf 5.6 server, that would be expected when:

– the interface sender is going through a firewall and the IP of the new cloverleaf 5.6 server is getting blocked.

– the TCP/IP listener is configured to only accept a connection from one specified IP address.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Mark McDaid]

Thanks for the replies.  We’ll be moving the existing IP address over to the new server when we go live so that none of the interfaces will have to change the IP for Cloverleaf.  Luckily we don’t have any 24 hour clinics, so this can easily be done after hours.

[Richard Hart]

Hi Mark.

We will be migrating to 5.6.1 from 5.4.1 and will do similar testing to you, except, we set up special sites that replicate all the interfaces we have in production and have one master site that replicates the PAS, LAB  and order applications for sending and each application for receiving.

We store the incoming messages in SMAT.  This way, we only change the host address (if we are changing servers in the migration) for the ‘prod’ NetConfigs and we test the resend and PDL code as well.

Obviously we test all the housekeeping and maintenance scripts.

Be careful of the two environment variables that are used in the different revisions:

QUOVADX_INSTALL_DIR

CL_INSTALL_DIR

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