Planning the update

The update process should be planned in advance, to ensure both the full benefit from your v9.6.1 system and adherence to your schedules and needs.

To ensure a quick and efficient update, it is necessary to consider the following criteria before beginning the procedure:

• Prerequisites for the update

• The order of the servers update
• Downtime of the monitored technologies
• Downtime of the Precise product
• Update planning checklist

Prerequisites for the update

Before planning the update process, verify that:

• All minimum requirements were met before updating to v9.6.1, as per the Precise Minimum Requirements for Installation guide.
• The Precise installation that is going to be updated is fully updated to v9.5. If it still has agents that were not yet updated to v9.5, complete the update to v9.5 prior to starting to update to v9.6.1.
• There is free disk space on the servers that have Precise v9.5 installed, as follows:
  • 0.5GB on each server with Precise Agents
  • 2.5 GB on the Precise Framework server
• There is 0.5GB free disk space on the client server that the update will be executed from.
• You do not have Precise for Tuxedo in your environment.

The order of the servers update

Your existing Precise installation typically spans many servers. Since the update to Precise v9.6.1 is performed per server, you should plan in advance the order in which you will update all servers comprising your existing Precise installation.

If you are not able to update all servers at once, but will update a few servers at a time, take note of the implications described in The implications of a phased update to Precise v9.6.1 on page 8.

The order of the server update is:

• First all FocalPoint servers need to be updated.
• Then all other servers can be updated.

When starting the update, you must select all the FocalPoints servers. You can add additional servers for the update later (once the FocalPoints servers are updated), or as part of the FocalPoint update (in this case the server update will start once the FocalPoint servers are completely updated).

The implications of a phased update to Precise v9.6.1

If you are not updating all servers at once, but are updating a few servers at a time, the following limitations will apply to your Precise system functionality:

• After an update has started, a server that has not fully completed the update cannot have instances installed, edited, or uninstalled.
• For installed Web and J2EE Clusters, new instances will not be installed until the cluster's servers are updated.
• If you have created a Template Listener as part of you server’s image, new Template Listener installations will fail after the update. You must recreate the Template Listener once the framework update has been completed.

Downtime of the monitored technologies

The update process does not require any downtime of the monitored technologies.

Downtime of the Precise product

The update process involves downtime of the Precise product itself as described below.

FocalPoints

When updating the servers with the Precise FocalPoints, your installed Precise performance monitoring system will not be in operation. Once the Precise Framework update is complete, Precise v9.6.1 will resume all performance monitoring previously provided by Precise v9.5.

The time required for updating a server with the Precise FocalPoints may vary depending on the strength of the server with the FocalPoint, the strength of the server where you are using AdminPoint to apply the update, the file transfer speed, the amount of Precise technologies monitored by Precise, and the time it takes to perform post-application action items. In general, updating a server with a Precise FocalPoint is estimated at one hour.

Updating a server with a FocalPoint will be fastest when application of the update is performed using AdminPoint on the Main node server with the Precise FocalPoint, and the update is located on storage providing good response time to that server.

If you have a federated Precise deployment, then when updating the servers with the FocalPoint of the Main node, your entire Precise federated deployment will not be operable for performance monitoring. When updating another node's servers with a FocalPoint, only that node will not be operable for performance monitoring.

Non-FocalPoint agents

Precise agents will not collect performance data while they are being updated. The time it takes to update a server running Precise agents varies depending on the technology type and the amount of Precise agents on that server, as well as the factors described above regarding updating the server with the Precise FocalPoints. In general, updating a Precise agents server is estimated at 20 minutes.

Update planning checklist

The following checklist can be used to verify that you are ready to start performing the update to Precise v9.6.1:

 

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