Installation Guides › Upgrade Guide › Planning Migration and Upgrades › How to Distinguish Between Migration and Upgrade

How to Distinguish Between Migration and Upgrade

There are differences between an upgrade and a migration of a SOA Security Manager environment. An upgrade typically consists of a step-by-step operation that you perform on individual SOA Security Manager components, such as Policy Servers or SOA Agents. During an upgrade, you must take the component you are upgrading offline, perform the upgrade, then bring it back online again. The component is unavailable to the others during an upgrade.

A migration is a sequence of upgrades that you perform over an extended period of time, while maintaining overall system availability. The key to migration is proper planning. To minimize problems, develop a migration plan before starting a migration.

The migration plan should include the following:

• List the order that you plan to upgrade each SOA Security Manager component (Policy Servers, SOA Agents, and SOA Security Gateways).
• Identify the Windows or UNIX systems hardware where you plan to install each SOA Security Manager component.
• Implement a recovery plan that lets you return to your original configuration if the upgrade fails since you cannot undo a migration or upgrade. Thus, you must back up your entire environment before beginning the migration.
• Decide where you will store exported policy store data files for safekeeping and avoid overwriting or misplacing these files.
• Decide where you will import old policy store data.
• Create a non-production environment where you can perform a test migration to become familiar with the steps necessary to later migrate a production environment. Migrating a non-production environment allows you to troubleshoot any migration issues so you do not have to bring down mission-critical resources.
• Develop a strategy to test the performance of each SOA Security Manager component.