Patch Management

[Former Member]

Hi All,

Please pardon me if this is a strange question but I have about 11 application servers with BI4.0 Patch4.12 on it. I am just trying to figure out what would be the best way of patching these servers with minimal downtime. I mean currently since we cannot do CMS boxes in parallel and considering that each install takes atleast an hour or more to finish i am looking at more than 8hrs of downtime everytime we patch the platform.

Any suggestions?

[former_member190781 · Accepted solution]

I am assuming its 11 nodes clustered environment.

First of all it is not recommended that you perform parallel patch update on all nodes in a cluster environment as the upgrade will not only make changes in the file system but also the CMS metadata.

As per my knowledge you have following two options:

1.

> Patch primary node with all other SIAs stopped and on this primary node only CMS, FRS running.

> After patch done on this box make sure that all servers are started then go to the second box and start upgrade here without starting SIA, using primary CMS. After patching done start SIA likewise do the same for rest of the boxes.

2. This is kind of weird workaround I would say. (Havent tried this yet)

Uncluster all the boxes and point each CMS on different DB. and then perform parallel patching. If all done then cluster all the SIAs. I would suggest to try this on Test environment first.

Regards,

Sohel

[Former Member]

Thanks Guys. It seems like even though we can do some stuff in parallel but there is really no way to do it with least downtime it will still require some significant downtime.

[denis_konovalov]

Starting with SP5 parallel patch install is an option.

However specific steps are required for it to be succesfull :

1. Patch CMS boxes first (all other SIA are stopped) (leave only CMS/FRS running on CMS boxes)

2. Patch non-CMS boxes after #1 is done succesfully (read install logs to verify) and with only one CMS runing. Non-cms boxed - stop SIA's on them prior to start.

3. patch Web tier after #2 is done.