How to migrate JIRA, Confluence and Crowd to brand new servers with newer versions

Question

We currently have a configuration with JIRA 6.3, Confluence 5.6.6, and Crowd 2.8.0 using SQL Server as a store in our data center.

We are shooting to eventually have a configuration on AWS with RDS (Postgress) JIRA Software 7, Confluence 5.9 and Crowd 2.8.3.

Should we first upgrade the three applications in our data center to the latest versions and then do a full XML backup on each of the three data center servers?

Or should we simply do a full XML backup of our current servers as they are now (JIRA 6.3, Confluence 5.6, Crowd 2.8.0) and restore the XML backup in the new servers with higher versions (JIRA Software 7, Confluence 5.9 and Crowd 2.8.3)?

Note: I'm presuming that JIRA, Confluence, and Crowd all have an full XML backup to ease replacing the underlying DB from SQL Server to Postgress.

Rahul Aich [Nagra] · Accepted Answer

If you follow the latter you are sure to kill two birds at the same time, but it comes at a cost of complexity. If there are any issues it will be much more harder to debug i.e. when you are doing database/server migration and upgrade at the same time.

If i were you i would isolate all the changes, and do one at a time. I would surely not couple the upgrade and server migration at the same time.

My recommendation would be to do the server migrations first, once you are happy with the new infrastructure on thesame version, you can then progress on to do the upgrade.

All of this comes with the assumption that you test on a test instance before trying on production.

Rahul