upgrading from 8.13 to 10.3

[Peter Stickney]

I have been charged with migrating an existing 8.13.7 install hosted on RHEL 7 to a 10.3 install hosted on RHEL 9.

I haven't found much in the way of a plan for this, so I thought I would install 8.13.7 on my new server, import the data from the old server and then do in place upgrades on my new server, until I got to the desired version.  Which would look something like this:

8.13.7 → 8.13.27 → 8.20.30 → 9.4.30 →9.12.29 → 10.3.13

Is that overkill?

I realize the docs for most of those versions isn't even online anymore, so I don't have know what hiccups to expect, or settings to tweak.  Anyone have any more experience with something like this?

[Tinker Fadoua · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community @Peter Stickney !

I would have suggested 8.13.7 → 9.0.0 → 10.0.0 -> 10.3.13

Any reason you decided to go in the following order?

8.13.7 → 8.13.27 → 8.20.30 → 9.4.30 →9.12.29 → 10.3.13

Best,

Fadoua

[Peter Stickney]

@Tinker Fadoua from the docs I couldn't determine a logical upgrade path, so I just picked every LTS version.  If yours is a supported path, I'd do that for sure, thanks for the suggestion.

[Tinker Fadoua]

Check the following for any manual upgrade:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/upgrading-jira-data-center-manual-938846951.html

I learned long time ago that when upgrading from a major version to another one, always upgrade to X.0.0 because that's the version that has the major changes then you can upgrade to X.y.z

Some important information to read:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-8-13-long-term-support-release-change-log-1018783382.html

Please let me know if anything else is needed.

Best,

Fadoua

[Peter Stickney]

That is good stuff actually, thanks for the pointers!

[Matteo Vecchiato · Accepted solution]

Hi @Peter Stickney ,

Welcome to Atlassian community.

Linux is always supported, so the steps you need to define are not dependent of SO.

The steps you need to define are mainly owed by the database supported version, you need to define the jumps based on database version.

Which current version of database you have?

Regards

[Peter Stickney · Accepted solution]

Thanks @Matteo Vecchiato

I will be in the office tomorrow to look more closely at this.  Sorry for asking more questions, I'm no expert in this software, but are you asking what version of database server, pgsql or mysql, we are running, or is there some schema version of the Jira database I have to find?

[Matteo Vecchiato]

Yes, only Database server and version.

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

Also the JDK version too. This is a good sized piece of work but doable

[Peter Stickney]

OK, on my current server with Jira 8.13.7 I've got mysql 5.7.21 and openJDK 1.8

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

The required versions for everything is at https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver103/supported-platforms-1489806894.html

[Peter Stickney]

I've read that page @Matt Doar _Adaptavist_.  I was looking also at a strategy to go from 8.13 to 10.3.  This seems reasonable to me, as @Tinker Fadoua pointed out.

8.13.7 → 9.0.0 → 10.0.0 -> 10.3.13

But the question for me is will Jira 8.13 run on a RHEL 9 machine with JDK 21 and mysql 8.x, or do I need to install the older supporting tools?

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

I had to dig around to find the matching page for 8.13 but I think this is it:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver0813/supported-platforms-1027137429.html
RHEL9 should be fine, JDK 21 not ok, mysql 8 ok I think

[Peter Stickney]

Oh, this will be a big help, I couldn't find the older docs.  Looks like you can just change the URL for the version you are looking for.

I see what you mean about the unsupported JDK there in 8.13.7.

I won't have time to start any of this in the next couple of days, but this has given me some good info.  I'll update here with some details for any future, wayward travelers!

[Peter Stickney]

Updating here for posterity's sake.

I ended up going 8.13.7 → 9.0.0 → 10.0.0 -> 11.2.1 with no issues.

Some fun things.  8.13 was installed via the Linux bin installer.  I figured I'd do the same for 9.0, but the installer wouldn't let me customize the install path, so I installed java 11 and then jira 9.0 via the tar.gz file and followed suit for subsequent updates.

The upgrade to 10.0 went fine as well.  It was at this point though, where I came hit a snag.  Up until this point, I was using a local mysql8 database server on this RHEL9 machine.  I need to run it in FIPS mode, so I had temporarily disabled that to accommodate the installation of the mysql JDBC driver.  My ultimate goal though was to point my install at a separate postgresql 17 server, which Jira 10.3 LTS doesn't support.  After some soul searching and light LTS research, I decided to jump right to 11.2.1, so I could use my postgresql 17 server.  I'm hoping that Atlassian announces 11.3 will be an LTS or something soon.

At any rate, I found this page

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver103/switching-databases-1489806941.html

And successfully migrated from a local mysql server to a remote postgresql one.

Connecting with Crowd went fine, there was some fapolicy rule writing, some SSL wrangling, as expected, https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver100/connecting-to-ssl-services-1442846077.html

This was useful in setting up Apache to proxy everything behind SSL

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver100/running-jira-applications-over-ssl-or-https-1442846078.html

In the end, everything seems to be fine!  Already planning on a similar adventure with Confluence this week!