Performing a rolling upgrade

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You can roll out maintenance incrementally in an IBM® Business Automation Workflow installation that consists of Workflow Center and multiple workflow servers, allowing for the continued running of production applications during the upgrade and regression test period.

About this task

To perform a rolling upgrade, upgrade the workflow servers and then Workflow Center and tools.
Note: A rolling upgrade can be performed only when fix packs, refresh packs, or interim fixes are applied. It cannot be used for migration between major releases.

Procedure

Assuming that you have a development environment, a staging environment, and an offline production server, complete the following steps:

  1. Upgrade your staging server environment. Test your applications in the new environment and make sure that they work as expected.
  2. Upgrade your development server environment. Test your applications in the new environment and make sure that they work as expected.
  3. Upgrade your production server environment.
  4. Upgrade Workflow Center.
    Note: A Workflow Center environment must be upgraded only after server environment that is associated with it.
    The Workflow Center maintains a full version history of all the process applications, and new function capability cannot be introduced before the entire topology is upgraded. After you upgrade the Workflow Center, reconnect any servers that are online. Make sure that everything works as expected.

     23.0.2 
    Upgrade solutions directly within the production environment

    • Previously, the solution version upgrade and the environment upgrade had to be done separately. Now, with the new rolling upgrade feature for case solutions, the workflow project is installed and upgraded along with the solution installation in the production environment.
    • Previously, in order to upgrade the workflow projects you had to upgrade them using the development environment and then the upgraded workflow projects had to be installed in the production. Now, during the installation of the workflow project in the production environment, the workflow project upgrade also happens. The Legacy solutions can be upgraded in the production by using the Swagger API.
    • The 100 custom.xml file needs to be configured for the rolling solution upgrade during installation of the work flow project in production environment. The following configuration needs to be added 
      <server merge="mergeChildren"><run-automatic-case-project-upgrade merge="replace">true</run-automatic-case-project-upgrade></server>
      Refer to following page for configuring the 100 custom.xmlfile: The 100Custom.xml file and configuration