Chapter 4 Upgrading Identity Manager in the Production Environment

Chapter 4
Upgrading Identity Manager in the Production Environment

This section contains information and suggestions for upgrading your production environment. It contains the following sections:

Developing a Production Rollout Plan

Deploying the Upgrade in a Production Environment

Changing TaskDefinition Objects in Production

Developing a Production Rollout Plan

To develop a successful production rollout plan, incorporate the information you gathered while upgrading your test environment with the following basic guidelines:

Create and document your production deployment image.

Import any upgraded objects and files (not the entire environment) from the test environment. Create a deployment image that is compatible with your development process.



Note	If you need assistance, contact your Sun Account Representative or Sun Customer Support.

Generally a deployment image consists of two parts:

File system: You can build a file system in the form of zip files from the testing environment and deploy this file system into the production environment after upgrading.

Repository objects: Create an XML file that is similar in structure to init.xml or upgrade.xml. Package this file as part of the upgrade so that when you are ready, you can import the XML file into the production environment. Importing the XML file creates or modifies the corresponding repository objects.

Create upgraded forms, workflows, and email templates.

Import these updates into the current version.

Document any amendments to your plan, which includes documenting other special procedures that apply to the production environment. For example,

Scheduling an outage for the application

Scheduling database administrator support

Notifying users before taking the system offline

Shutting down specific resources, processes, or applications that are used in production

Deploying the Upgrade in a Production Environment

This section provides instructions for deploying the Identity Manager upgrade into your production environment.

Before You Begin

Before you start upgrading Identity Manager in a production environment, you must back up your production data:

Stop all processes and all client access, and then shutdown (or idle) Identity Manager.

Take a baseline snapshot of your file system objects, operating system,
JDK, repository, and Web applications.



Note	For the repository, take a snapshot of the database where the repository is stored. For your Web applications, perform a full backup of the Web application directory.

Clean up unnecessary files and hotfixes.

Deploy the Upgrade

Perform the following steps to deploy the Identity Manager upgrade:

Deploy from the packaged development environment.

Import any modifications based on differences between test and product environments.

Changing TaskDefinition Objects in Production

You might find it necessary to update the code in a production environment while there are existing, executing TaskInstances present. This section describes the best practice for upgrading TaskDefinition objects in production.

From the Identity Manager console:

Rename the current TaskDefinition to include a timestamp.

For example, rename Create User to Create User 20030701.



Note	You must rename the TaskDefinition object to prevent any problems with existing Create User tasks that might be in a suspended state within Identity Manager. Renaming the TaskDefinition object allows the existing TaskDefinition to keep its unique ID, which is referenced inside suspended tasks.

Load the new TaskDefinition.



Caution	Problems might occur if you change activities or actions. The TaskInstance references the TaskDefinition (not the entire object) and stores the current activity or action by ID. If you change those ID numbers in any way, the task might not pick up where you expected when the task starts executing again.

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Sun Java[TM] System Identitiy Manager 7.0 Upgrade