Best Practice for cloning JIRA, to test upgrade?

Question

About our current production setup:

* JIRA v7.10.2
* Postgre DB
* Windows Server 2012 VM
* We have a handful of Bitbucket DVCS links but no other apps (that I know of).
* (4) User-Installed add-ons

GOALS

We want to test the upgrade to JIRA 8, then check for any incompatibilities. I am trying to follow the Best Practices as suggested in this KB,
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-articles/Upgrade-Best-Practices/ba-p/932563

So, I have cloned the VM, then restricted its access to the public Internet, i.e., it cannot communicate with any other internal server. I have confirmed that I have working access to the Atlassian Market, e.g. I was able to update the Universal Plugin Manager (from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3). I am now prepared to test the full upgrade?

QUESTIONS

* am I going to blow-up my license by running the clone VM?
* am I going to blow-up my license by upgrading JIRA on the clone?
* Do I need to generate a new license key for the new v8 software, and if so will I be able to re-use the (test) key on the production server -- once we really do upgrade?
* All the things I don't know ??

Jimmy Seddon · Answer

Hi Tony,

That I unfortunately can't help you with as the only add-ons we have installed are free ones.

Sorry I can't offer anymore help there.

-James

Tony_Tovar_-_work · Answer

Thanks, James! Yes, I will definitely get some dept mgrs to login to the test server and look around.

I guess the whole question about licenses is moot if I switch the test server to the 'dev' license? But what about the licenses on our add-ons? How are the licenses being enforced -- or are they? Obviously, things would be a lot simpler if they weren't being strictly enforced.

Jimmy Seddon · Answer

Hi @Tony_Tovar_-_work,

To answer your question about your license.  On https://my.atlassian.com/products/index

If you expand the line item for your Jira server, you should be able to "View Developer License"

From my interactions with Atlassian Support, that is the recommended license to use for a non-production environment.

As far as "All the things I don't know ??" - We upgraded from 7.5.0 to 8.1.0 and on our test server we had a focus group of users from the various teams connect to the test server (which had a copy of our production data) and we had them "pretend" to do work to make sure that the UI changes and the new features were functioning for the way they interact with the system.  We discovered a couple of our pluigins were working as expected and we needed to wait for those to beupdated before we were able to upgrade.  That is the one thing if you can organize it that I would recommend to everyone.

I hope that helps.

-James