Best way to migrate Jira 3.9 "unlimited user" license to 7, "10 user license"

[Elmar Elmar]

What is the prefered path to migrate selected projects from JIRA 3.9 professional, with unlimited users, to a JIRA 7 with 10 users?

Which license(s) do I need to follow the recommended path in JIRA 3.13 to JIRA 7?

Can i test the above  migration path with a new evaluation license?

Is there a bether way, if we only migrate selected projects with ~1000 of tickets, but only 10 users?

I'm really confused at the moment....

[Elmar Elmar]

Thanks Dave for the detailed answer.

Indeed, I run into problems: It seems that we do have a WAR installation. Unfortunately I cannot migrate to a installer version, because I can't find the JIRA 3.9.1 linux BIN version on the Atlassian site (neither the 4.0 WAR). It's really frustrating.

I do also consider to write a small application, getting the old tickets by SOAP and putting it by the new REST interface to the new JIRA 7.6 installation. Has anybody done that like that?

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

Here's what I would do.

1. Perform the upgrade on your JIRA 3.9 data to the latest version of JIRA on a Dev server (don't touch Production yet!)
2. When you get to the JIRA 4.0 portion of the migration, install an eval key.
3. Once you get the data upgraded to JIRA.latest, use the REST API (or JIRA CLI) to disable all users except the 10 that will fit into your 10 use license.
4. Install the 10 user license key.
5. Document the steps you followed and use that as your checklist for the Production migration.

Having said that, these type of upgrades are pretty messy.  You're likely to run into several bugs that plagued <4.0 JIRA versions. Some of them require manual manipulation of the data in the database or XML dump. We don't see many versions of JIRA as old as this any more, but we've done a ton of this type of upgrade.  You might want to reach out to an Atlassian Expert for help on this.  We Experts specialize in stuff like this and will allow you to hand it off to us and let us figure out how to get you upgraded. 

Once your data is upgraded, you can choose to set up a fresh instance of JIRA and import the Projects you care about or delete the Projects that you don't care about.  If you choose to start fresh and import selected Projects, you will need to create all of the underlying Project infrastructure for each Project to import or you won't be able to perform the import.  Essentially, the Project Import function in JIRA expects to be used in a case where you deleted a Project from an existing JIRA instance and then restored to the same instance.  It expects all the custom fields, workflow statuses, users, priorities, etc to exist in the JIRA instance. If they don't, you will need to create them first and allow them access to the Project before the import will succeed.  It's probably easier to just delete the old Projects.