OK to run same JIRA server instance on 2 servers during migration?

[Ray]

Am planning to migrate my JIRA server instance from an old server to a new server.  During migration, I'd like to temporarily leave JIRA running on the old server for a few days (for user access), while I concurrently run and test JIRA on the new server to make sure everything works. 

Would this conflict with the JIRA license or cause an error?  Is there a time limit when running the same JIRA instance on 2 servers?     Thanks.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Yes, you can (and should) do this. 

To stick to the letter of your licence terms though, you should only use your production licence on the new server.  You don't need another production licence for the old one though - you can give it a "developer" licence, which you get free with your main licence.

Log into https://my.atlassian.com/products/index , find your licence key and look underneath it for "developer licence"

[Ray]

Thanks Nic, I did not know about the developer licenses.  And I see there is a separate developer license for each of the plugins that we use.  This looks like the best approach.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The nice thing about the developer licences is that you can use them for just about anything and for many concurrent systems - disaster recovery, development, staging, UAT, reporting duplication, kicking the tyres on an upgrade, etc.  And we know that they provide identical functionality that your production system does.

I would say that Atlassian have, in my experience, been accepting of licence "abuse", where people re-use licences in a technically illegal way.  I think the questions they got about it led to the Developer licences I'm talking about.

I remember the second or third Jira upgrade I did involved a migration to new hardware as well, so I asked the same question you have, and the response boiled down to
1. We should look at how we do dev/test/upgrade/migration licences
2. It's about intention, not what you need to do to get there.

I "got away with" re-using production licences for several projects where the goals were "move Jira from server X to server Y", and "upgrade Jira from version w to z"..  The developer licences mean I don't have to think about that any more.

[Mirek]

Hi @Ray 

Technically everything is possible but in practice not sure if this is a good approach to leave both instances running. You would have to make sure that second instance is not generating any notification or not conflicting with the source.. so this would not be a good test..  And of course over those "few days" people might add some data to the source so you might end up that you would need to do the data migration again. The best approach is to migrate this over the weekend, test and have a go/no go decision to stay on the new server or not.

[Ray]

Thanks Mirek, I appreciate your reply.  I had not thought about the notifications, so will be sure to configure notification emails on the second instance appropriately.  Am aware of the need to re-sync the SQL database content.  Our new server runs in a different environment that requires more than a weekend to test everything, so my plan "B" is to shutdown user access for a week if I have to (i.e. if the second instance does not work out).  Thanks again for your help.

[Omar Sehad]

Hello @Ray 

Does the approach of synchronizing the target instance with SQL work well? Are you able to do go with this approach?