Help sandboxing an upgrade

[WilliamH]

Following this link give a description of how to upgrade Jira 5.x.

There is a mention that an upgrade should be done first in a sandbox (sect. 1.7).

We have questions about the best method for setting up a sandbox.

Question 1: Will our license permit multiple instances of Jira/Confluence/Greenhopper/Crowd/Stash and Crucible to run while we do our testing.

Question 2: Is it safe to install a second newer instance of Jira on our production box alongside an older instance, point it to the old database (while the older instance is running) and test the newer instance?

Question 3: Do you recommend sandboxing Crowd, Stash, Confluence and Crucible as well?

Question 4: Do we need to purchase a separate license for another server in order to runa sandbox?

We need a general outline of how the Atlassian tools can be sandboxed and the requriements for such.

Thank you,

Will Hough

Sharp Labs of America

whough@sharplabs.com

[Harry Chan · Accepted solution]

Question 1: You are allowed to run a Development instance by getting a developer license. You can do this from your My Atlassian account (where your paid licenses are).

Question 2: It is not recommended, but assuming your production box does have enough resources to run both instances, you'll need to completely separate the resources. They cannot run the same database. Please make a copy of the database and home directory and point this at the new instance.

Question 3: It is recommended to test all upgrades/customizations/anything else prior to apply this to production.

Question 4: Refer to 1. You are able to run your development license on a separate box as long as it is used as a development instance for your production box.

The recommended solution is to have a separate environment to test the upgrade before scheduling the upgrade on production. This way you can get your users to test all the new features, fix any teething issues and then carefully plan the upgrade. If issues are found in the test environment, you can then either contact Atlassian for support or log bugs and wait for them to be fixed in the next release before proceeding with the upgrade.

Nothing can be worse than an upgrade that went wrong and loss of functionality for your users!

Cheers,