Chapter 5 Upgrading Your Production Environment

Although you perform only one task to upgrade your Production environment, and the process for upgrading Production is very similar to the processes described in Task 6: Upgrade Your Development Environment and Task 11: Upgrade Your QA Environment, upgrading Production is specifically described separately to highlight its importance.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Special Considerations for Production

• Task 13: Upgrade Your Production Environment

Special Considerations for Production

Your upgrade procedure probably includes steps that are important only when you are upgrading your Production environment. For example, your upgrade procedure might include:

• Scheduling an outage for your Identity Manager application

• Scheduling database administrator support

• Notifying users before taking the application offline

• Shutting down specific resources, processes, or applications that are used only in your Production environment

Upgrading your Production environment might also pose special considerations that require advanced techniques. For example, to minimize the downtime of your Identity Manager application, you might want to upgrade a separate server and a separate database in a parallel Production instance. After upgrading the parallel instance, you might want to make the original Production instance unavailable, synchronize from the actual Production system to the parallel instance any data that changed during the time that the parallel instance was being upgraded, and then switch over to the parallel Production instance.

Advanced techniques such as these are beyond the scope of this document. If you have any special considerations or technical questions related to upgrading your Production environment, contact your Sun Professional Services to request assistance.

Task 13: Upgrade Your Production Environment

The procedure for updating the Production environment must contain the same steps as your procedure for updating the QA environment. Some specific parameter values, such as host names and connection information, can be different.

If there is any significant difference between the procedure for upgrading the QA environment and the procedure for upgrading the Production environment, then document the specific reasons for this variance. For example, it might not be feasible to simulate certain aspects of the Production environment in the QA environment. By documenting this variance, you allow the people involved in your Upgrade Project to make an informed judgment as to the risk posed by this variance.