Assisted Side by Side Upgrade Tool for IBM Tivoli Common Reporting

Resolving The Problem

Since install/upgrade usually happens on the same hardware, conflicts are bound to happen with the shared resources when a second instance of the same product is being installed. In order to eliminate such failures, this utility can be used. As product install/upgrade failures often lead to customer dissatisfaction, IBM Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) team has taken this step towards developing this utility to solve this pain point and gain customer confidence in using our products.

The tool, when invoked, detects the potential resource conflicts and recommends relevant changes to be made so that the product install/upgrade becomes successful. Examples of some cases where this tool can be used are:

a) Upgrading TCR from v1.2 to v2.1.1 on the same server
b) Upgrading TCR from v2.1.1 to v3.1 on the same server

However, this utility can be extended to be used with any other product which follows a similar installation mechanism (response file based) with necessary changes.

Following are the steps to follow to install this light weight tool (Example used is TCR installation):

1. Download the attached Assisted Side by Side Upgrade Tool i.e. SPU.jar

2. Extract the files from the SPU.jar file from the location where is saved:

for example: /home/unzip SPU.jar

3. Open the actual component response file from the media package and list down the properties to be validated ex: Path, Port etc

4. Remove all the properties that exist in ruleFile.txt which is available after SPU.jar file extract.

Copy all the below properties which are available in the TCR response file to the ruleFile.txt

For TCR 2.1/2.1.1

path@TIP_INSTALLATION_DIRECTORY=/opt/IBM/tcr21,free:5GB
path@TCR_INSTALLATION_DIRECTORY=/opt/IBM/tcr21_21,free:5GB
port@WAS_WC_defaulthost=30321,incr:10,count:10
Port@COGNOS_CONTENT_DATABASE_PORT=1527,incr:5,count:1

For TCR 3.1

path@JAZZSM_HOME_DIRECTORY=/opt/IBM/JazzSM
port@CONTENT_STORE_DATABASE_PORT=50000


Notes:
(i) "Free:5GB": It checks for 5GB available space. If not available the tool checks for other
drives which have enough free space and updates the path to the respective property value
(ii) "incr:10": looks for the availability of port, if not available, it then increments the original port
by 10 and checks again for an available port.
(iii) "count:10": Once a vacant port is found, the tool verifies the availability of a series of 10
successive ports. If any one port in the series is occupied, step (ii) above is repeated before proceeding with step (iii).

5. Using 'dos2Unix' command please convert console.sh file to unix compatible and Run ./Console.sh file

6. Go to ../SPU/prs/unix provide execute permission to all script files

7. SPU prompt will be opened

8. On typing help and hitting enter, all available commands will appear as below

verbose
generate
exit

9. Enable logging by running verbose command like SPU>verbose

10. Execute the generate option as shown below by passing the original response file that comes with the install media

generate -t /home/tcr211/TCRInstaller/TCR_sample_response_embedded.txt -o /home/ss/out211.txt

where
/home/tcr211/TCRInstaller/TCR_sample_response_embedded.txt is the path to the original TCR response file that comes with media package
/home/ss/out211.txt is the output response file that the generate command will produce

11. Once the out211.txt file is generated, please open the file and update other properties like LICENSE_ACCEPTED, WAS_USER_NAME, WAS_PASSWORD etc

12. Use the generated output response file to install TCR
Here is the example which shows how TCR can be installed by passing the output response file.

Silent mode - ./install.bin -i silent -f /home/ss/out211.txt
GUI Mode - ./install.bin -i GUI -f /home/ss/out211.txt
Console Mode - ./install.bin -i console -f /home/ss/out211.txt

SPU.jar