Choosing what to migrate
For most migration scenarios, you can choose between migrating all business data and applications to IBM BPM V8.5, or migrating artifacts only.
When you migrate your existing applications and associated business data, long-running processes maintain their state during migration and historical business instance data is carried forward into the new version. A maintenance window is required for this type of migration.
When you migrate artifacts, you import your applications from your current production environment into development tools and migrate the applications using the migration procedures of the development tools. This process enables applications to use new features and functions from the new version. No downtime is required because there is a parallel production path. The previous version must stay until the existing business data completes processing. Business and historical data are not accessible from the new version.
Migrating business data and applications
To migrate business data and applications, you take a snapshot of your current environment (the source), including configuration information, performance customizations, applications, and service integration bus (SIB) messages, and import it into your new environment (the target). You point to your databases from your new environment and update the databases.
These migration procedures work on one deployment environment at a time. If your environment contains multiple deployment targets, take time to consider the relationships within your topology so that they will be mapped properly in the properties files.
- You have long-running process or human task instances that started in the source environment and need to complete in the target environment.
- You have product data in queues that were created in the source environment and need to survive the migration and be managed in the target production environment.
- You can tolerate a production environment downtime window to perform the migration.
- You want to move your applications to the target version without a dependency on the development tools and the development environment.
- Source environment application data remains, using existing database tables
- Process and human tasks can start in the source environment and complete in the target environment
- Application instance data on queues in the source environment can be migrated to the target environment
- No dependency on the development tools
- Source environment applications are migrated to the target environment
- Downtime is required when the target product environment assumes the role of the source production environment
- All applications on a node must be ready to migrate at the same time
- All business process definition (BPD) instances in the source must be ready to migrate at the same time
- New features are not enabled automatically and sometimes are unavailable without migrating the application artifacts using artifact migration
- Test focus:
- End-to-end testing to validate migration process
- Regression testing and performance tuning
Migrating artifacts
With the artifact migration process, you create a parallel target production environment that is configured from scratch differently from the source production environment. Artifact migration results in applications whose artifacts are migrated to the new version, enabling the applications to be modified to use the new capabilities delivered by the new version of IBM® Business Process Manager. The application can then be tested and deployed to the parallel target production environment. When the applications are deployed to the target production environment, they create a new set of database tables, so they do not have access to the application data stored in the databases configured for the source production environment.
- You want to use the development tools and development environment to migrate the application artifacts to the new version and validate the compatibility of your applications.
- You want to use the development tools to update your applications to use new capability delivered by IBM Business Process Manager.
- You want to reconfigure your topology as part of the process of migrating to the new version of IBM Business Process Manager, or you can manually duplicate your source production environment configuration in your parallel production environment.
- You do not have long-running process instances and human tasks, or you can run parallel production environments while you drain the process instances and human tasks in the source environment as new instances are started in the target production environment.
- You have application data in queues or failed events in product databases that were created in the source environment that can be managed to completion in the source production environment while new messages and events are routed in parallel to the target production environment.
- You cannot incur any downtime in your production environment and can concurrently manage parallel source and target production environments.
- You want to selectively migrate applications from your source production environment to the new version of IBM Business Process Manager with the development tools and selectively deploy those applications to your target production environment.
- Ability to use new features
- Parallel production environment supported:
- Selective application migration
- No downtime
- Ability to perform extensive testing before migrating to production environment
- No dependency on migration tools
- New development environment is required
- Existing data is not moved; new database tables are used
- Manual (scripted) deployment of applications is required
- Requires updates to client applications
- Hardware and software licenses might need to be evaluated for any additional licenses required when running in parallel.
- Additional test coverage for application updates is required.