Plan to migrate JIRA to another OS.

[Harry Arevalo]

Hi Support,

Good day to you.

We are planning to migrate our existing JIRA to either windows 2012 R2 or CENTOS 7.4.

Can you please provide us some recommendations on what to do before we decide?

Thank you very much.

Regards,

Harry

[KellyW]

Hi Harry,

If you are restoring production data into a test JIRA instance for experimentation purposes, you probably want to disable JIRA's email interaction features before you begin:

• Disable email notifications — if JIRA is configured to send emails about changes to issues, and you want to make test modifications to the copy, you should start JIRA with the -Datlassian.mail.senddisabled=true flag.
• Disable POP/IMAP email polling — if JIRA is configured to poll a mailbox (to create issues from mails), you will likely want to disable this polling on your test installation. This is done by setting the -Datlassian.mail.fetchdisabled=true flag.

Exactly how to set these flags is dependent on your particular application server, but for JIRA, this is done by setting the DISABLE_NOTIFICATIONS environment variable before starting JIRA 

It is recommended that you avoid passing through a proxy when performing an XML restore, especially if your JIRA instance is very large. Using a proxy may cause timeout errors.

Do take backups prior to the migration and re-apply customised settings post migration.

Regards,
Kelly

[Harry Arevalo]

Hi Kelly,

Thank you for the response.

I would like to check with you with the following items.

1. Planning upgrade from JIRA 7.7 to 7.8 (Note: 32 bit) – Should we upgrade first to 7.8 before migrating it to CENTOS 7.4, please advise?
2. Any best practice you could recommend for moving to Linux? – We will be using a minimal during the installation and there will be no xwindow.
3. Do you know where we could change this setting below?

• Disable email notifications — if JIRA is configured to send emails about changes to issues, and you want to make test modifications to the copy, you should start JIRA with the -Datlassian.mail.senddisabled=true flag.
• Disable POP/IMAP email polling — if JIRA is configured to poll a mailbox (to create issues from mails), you will likely want to disable this polling on your test installation. This is done by setting the -Datlassian.mail.fetchdisabled=true flag.

Thank you very much.

Regards,

Harry

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Treat migration and upgrade as two separate steps (even if you do them together, plan them separately).  It does not matter which one you do first.

Although if you are changing the operating system to Linux, I would usually recommend moving server first and upgrade later, as that is generally slightly easier.

The best practice for the move is simply to read the migration docs carefully and make sure you understand what each step is doing, especially in areas where you may want to do something differently to the Atlassian docs.

The two -D flags Kelly has recommended can be added to the setenv.sh where you see other -D options (or setenv.bat if on Windows).  Remember to remove them and restart when moving to production, or no email will be processed!