Upgrade Overview

The following table shows supported Sun Java System Application Server upgrades, where PE indicates Platform Edition and EE indicates Enterprise Edition.

The software provides two methods, a command-line utility (asupgrade) and a graphical user interface (Upgrade Wizard), for completing the upgrade. If you issue the asupgrade command with no options, the Upgrade Wizard GUI will be displayed. If the asupgrade command is used in command-line mode and all of the required information is not supplied, an interviewer will request information for any required options that were omitted. The Upgrade Wizard automatically detects the version of the specified source server installation.

If a domain contains information about a deployed application and the installed application components do not agree with the configuration information, the configuration will be migrated as is without any attempt to reconfigure the incorrect configurations.

During an upgrade, the configuration and deployed applications of a previous version of the Application Server are migrated; however, the runtime binaries of the server are not updated. Database migrations or conversions are also beyond the scope of this upgrade process.

Only those instances that do not use Sun Java SystemWeb Server-specific features will be upgraded seamlessly. Configuration files related to HTTP path, CGI bin, SHTML, and NSAPI plug-ins will not be upgraded.

Application archives (EAR files) and component archives (JAR, WAR, and RAR files) that are deployed in the Application Server 7.x/8.0 environment do not require any modification to run on Application Server 8.1.

Applications and components that are deployed in the source server are deployed on the target server during the upgrade. Applications that do not deploy successfully on the target server must be migrated using the Migration Tool or asmigrate command, then deployed again manually.

If the upgrade includes clusters, specify one or more cluster files. Upon successful upgrade, an upgrade report is generated listing successfully migrated items along with a list of the items that could not be migrated.