Whats the easiest way to upgrade Jira from v4.0#466 to the latest and greatest?

Question

I'm at a company and want to move to the latest version of Jira and Greenhopper to take advantage of the new Rapid Board stuff and move the company away to a more Agile delivery approach. Trouble is the verion of Jira is v4.0#466 and its been waterfall'd to death with workflows and loads of custom fields.

I'd like to just stat a new instance but there is loads of data in the current one so whats the best option available? Do I upgrade the existing one or start with a new one and look to import the data vias something live the CSV inport function?

Anyone been through this and can offer some advice?

Dieter · Answer

Hi Mark,

Such an update is not possible without outage and without test system. Did you mean you need to update 500 JIRA instances? That's a lot!

I have done a lot of test migrations for my biggest instance before everything went smooth. While i had a slow server (was still on VMWare with SAN disk space) a migration took 17 hours, now after i have a fast 2 processor machine with 6 cores each and it's running in 4 hours. Of course for such a kind of migration with preparation and some after tests you must plan a whole working day. We did this on the weekend.

In order to be able to fallback we made a copy of the DB using mysqldump and initialized the JIRA 4 database with this backup. Of course this can only be done when the prod instance is not live.

The JIRA 4 instance was configured to use this database. Then we started the JIRA 4 instance which caused an inplace-upgrade. This is not officially supported but worked for us. The safe alternative is to make a backup of the JIRA 3 instance and restore this to a fresh JIRA 4 instance

So while migration of our biggest instance thos was offline for about 4 hours. I can't imagine how one could do this without such an outage.

I also just migrate one instance per weekend so in case something goes wrong you don't have too many problems at the same time.

Best regards,

Dieter

Mark Stocker2 · Answer

Interesting, how do you achive this without an outage? It must take time to apply each upgrade and there is a risk of something going bang during that process so how did you achive it.

Was it all done from start to finish on a Test environment first? and then when you applied it to the Live environment everything was backed up at each stage? Could you share the approach you adopted?

I'm faced with the situation where there is no test system and only 500 Jiras that we want to keep so thought this might be a quicker approach.

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Answer

It will be a lot easier to upgrade the JIRA and phase out the workflows and custom fields that starting afresh and doing data import using CSV and such.

Data imports are painful and you will lose lot of data and will not work if the workflows/custom fields etc are different.