Upgrading to Minor or Patch Version

Introduction

This document provides instructions for patching your Resolve Actions Pro 7.x installation to another 7.x version. Refer to Upgrade From Previous Major Version for v6.x to v7.x upgrades.

danger

It is important to do a hard backup of the Actions Pro directory and database before patching. VM snapshots are valid as well.

Prerequisites

Before upgrading to the current version, check the following.

Back Up Your Deployment

Make a hard backup of the Actions Pro directory, Elasticsearch, and database before upgrading. One way to do that is through VM snapshots.

caution

Due to changes in Elasticsearch, rollback is not possible with this upgrade.

Review the Release Notes

Review the Release Notes before you start the upgrade.

Review the System Requirements

Ensure that the system requirements are met before you start the upgrade:

• For standalone installations
• For clustered installations. 

Validate Production Use Cases

Between releases, Resolve makes regular changes to the JAR files that are part of Actions Pro to introduce new functionality and provide the latest stability and security updates. This may impact your existing use cases. It is recommended that you update a staging environment first to validate full functionality before upgrading your production environment(s). What you validate depends on your priorities—for example, if older reports or dashboard reports are not critical to your operations, issues with these can be deprioritized before moving to production. Ensure your identified use cases are fully tested to minimize disruptions.

Verify the following use cases:

• Automations
• Dashboards

Check what JAR files have been updated between your Actions Pro version and the version that you are upgrading to:

• JAR File Updates Between Versions

Uptime Tasks

Uptime tasks are tasks that you need to perform while your un-upgraded Actions Pro deployment is up and running, before you stop the Actions Pro services for the upgrade.

Identify All Connected Components

Version-mismatched components that try to connect to RabbitMQ (usually external RSRemote instances) will have an adverse effect on the upgrade. To identify the current connections before taking remediating action, use any of the approaches described below.

Identify Connections by IP

Run the following command:

<actions-pro-home>/rabbitmq/linux64/rabbitmq/sbin/rabbitmqctl list_connections

Identify Connections from the UI

Log in to Action and from the main menu, go to System Administration > List Registration.

Identify Connections Using RSConsole

After you log in to the RSConsole command-line utility, run these commands:

CONNECT BROADCAST
Info/info

note

In large environments, it is recommended to either increase the console buffer or record the command line while performing this task as the output might be large.

For more information on how to use RSConsole, see System Administration.

Downtime Tasks

Downtime tasks are tasks that you need to perform after you stop the Actions Pro services for the upgrade.

Where the tasks involve Blueprint.properties configuration changes, remember to run the configuration script after you make the changes to apply them:

<actions-pro-home>/bin/config.sh

Elasticsearch Settings

Starting with Actions Pro 7.2, the Actions Pro archiving feature started utilizing Elasticsearch Lifecycle Management instead of RSArchive.

If you are upgrading from Actions Pro version 7.1 or earlier, ensure the following Blueprint.properties configuration changes are in place before starting the upgrade:

• rssearch.shards=1

note

The property might have been set to 1 or higher in your environment even with RSArchive running. Resources will free up as the older indices with more shards are rolled over. To speed up the process, archive as much worksheet data as you can using RSArchive prior to the upgrade.

Operating System Tasks

Review the list of OS settings below to ensure that your system meets the minimum requirements. If is doesn’t run the <actions-pro-home>/bin/setup_limits.sh and <actions-pro-home>/bin/setup_sysctl.sh commands as root to set higher limits:

• FILE LIMIT=131072
• MEMORY_LIMIT=unlimited
• ADDRESS_LIMIT=unlimited
• PROCESS_LIMIT=10240
• ulimit = 131072
• vm.max_map_count = 262144

Network Connections

Ensure the network connectivity between the database and the Actions Pro cluster machines works without issue.

• Verify network ports. For more information, refer to System Requirements:
  • For standalone installations
  • For clustered installations

Groovy Sandbox File Backup

If you are upgrading from Actions Pro 7.6 or an earlier 7.x release, you need to take additional steps in relation to Groovy Sandbox whitelisting improvements made in Actions Pro 7.7.

You need to back up your Groovy Sandbox configuration before starting the upgrade. Back up the following files for each Actions Pro component that has Groovy Sandbox enabled:

• groovy_blacklist
• groovy_whitelist
• groovy_sandbox_properties

These files will be overwritten with defaults for RSArchive, RSConsole, RSControl, RSMgmt, RSRemote, and RSView during the upgrade.

After the upgrade, you can restore your original files or append to the new default files.

Running the Upgrade

This section contains information about the preparation phase of the migration. It also instructs about upgrading clustered environments and the related procedure.

Upgrading a Standalone Deployment

To upgrade your standalone Actions Pro deployment, take the following steps:

1. Ensure that Actions Pro is down (including all standalone RSRemote instances). Run the following on each node:
   Refer to Identify All Connected Components for help.

   # Stop the services
   <actions-pro-home>/bin/stop.sh all
   # Check if the services have indeed stopped
   <actions-pro-home>/bin/status.sh all
2. Copy the Actions Pro upgrade ZIP file to your Actions Pro installation directory.
3. Run the following command from the Actions Pro installation directory:

   <actions-pro-home>/bin/update.sh -u <rsconsole admin name> -p <rsconsole admin password> -f <upgrade zip file>

The upgrade script accepts the following options:

Option	Description
-u <username>	Where <username> is the username for logging into the RSConsole.
-p <password>	Use the default password if it hasn't been changed intentionally in a previous upgrade. note Ensure the username/password is correct. Otherwise several data migration steps may fail and the user will need to reapply the upgrade.
-f upgrade-x-x-x-x.zip	The name of the upgrade ZIP file.
-dns <hostname>	DNS host name to set into RSView properties for system URL (if not already set).
-port <port>	Host port to set into RSView properties for system URL (if not already set).
-lic	Enter license files (optional).
Continue	An upgrade option that should only be used prior to consulting with Resolve support.

Upgrading Clustered Deployments

Items to consider before you start the clustered upgrade:

• During the upgrade, the primary server will update the Actions Pro database, run data migration, and import the latest base Actions Pro imports. Depending on the server speed, this process might take 30+ minutes. You can monitor the process from the primary server’s rsview.log, rsmgmt.log and update.log.

• All the secondary Actions Pro servers within the cluster will wait until the primary has finished the upgrade tasks before upgrading themselves.

• Actions Pro does not support an upgrade on one server while other servers run an older Actions Pro version.

To upgrade your clustered Actions Pro deployment, take the following steps simultaneously on all Actions Pro machines in the cluster:

1. Ensure that Actions Pro is down (including all standalone RSRemote instances). Run the following on each node:
   Refer to Identify All Connected Components for help.

   # Stop the services
   <actions-pro-home>/bin/stop.sh all
   # Check if the services have indeed stopped
   <actions-pro-home>/bin/status.sh all
2. Copy the Actions Pro upgrade ZIP file to your Actions Pro installation directory.
3. Run the following command from the Actions Pro installation directory:

   <actions-pro-home>/bin/update.sh -u <rsconsole admin name> -p <rsconsole admin password> -f <upgrade zip file>

At any points of the upgrade process, if a task times out, it may display an option to continue. For example:

WARNING!!!  RSSearch Status is unavailable or 'red'.

If you want to continue with the Update, manually Monitor the Elasticsearch Cluster Status and Hit Y when the Status is at least Yellow.

To Cancel the Update hit N. (Y/N):

At this point, type N to cancel the current upgrade or provide no answer while you research and resolve the issue in a separate session. After you resolve the issue, type Y to continue the upgrade process.

Reapplying an Upgrade and Rollback

If the upgrade fails, please submit a ticket with Resolve Support.

https://support.resolve.io/

Post-Upgrade Steps

After the Actions Pro upgrade process is complete, there are several required and optional steps to take to finish the installation.

Required Actions

MariaDB Driver URL Scheme Update

The latest version of the MariaDB driver that comes with Actions Pro removes the support for the jdbc:mysql scheme in the JDBC URL, replacing it with jdbc:mariadb instead. Using the old scheme results in an error indicating that it cannot find the driver, due to the mariadb-java-client JAR file removing the MySQLDataSource class.

You need to update the DB URL scheme if you are using MariaDB as the Actions Pro DB and you are upgrading from the following versions:

• Any version preceding Actions Pro 7.6.0

You don't need to take any action if you are upgrading from Actions Pro 7.6.0 or later.

The upgrade updates most DB URL schemes in the product automatically, including the DB_URL property in blueprint.properties if it was set to jdbc:mysql, but does not update URLs in the following resource categories:

• Database Gateway settings
• ActionTasks and other content

See the following sections to learn how to update these resources.

Updating Database Gateway Settings

You can use an RSConsole script to automatically update any jdbc:mysql schemes in your Database Gateway settings.

1. Log in to any of the core machines that have the RSConsole component installed.
2. Start RSConsole and then log in to it:

   <actions-pro-home>/rsconsole/bin/run.sh
3. Change to the management directory:

   CD mgmt
4. Run the scheme auto-update command:

   UpdateDBConnPool.groovy

Updating ActionTasks and Other Content

The potential types of content where you could have used the outdated Database Connection Pool URL in Action Pro are as follows:

• Wiki Documents
• ActionTasks
• System Scripts
• Task Properties
• Legacy Gateways
• SDK2 Push Gateways
• SDK2 Pull Gateways
• SDK2 MSG Gateways

You will have to update the Database Connection Pool URL in these locations manually.

To make the process easier, Resolve provides the JDBC MySql Check automation on Resolve Exchange that can find and list all instances of the outdated Database Connection Pool URL in your code.

For example, you might have the following code in an ActionTask content section:

try (Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection( "jdbc:mysql://127.0.0.1:3306/test", "root", "password")) {
...

To keep using this code after the upgrade, you would need to update it as follows:

try (Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection( "jdbc:mariadb://127.0.0.1:3306/test", "root", "password")) {
...

Optional Actions

• Linux services:
  •  To set up the Actions Pro components to start automatically when the server is rebooted, run:

     bin/setup_service.sh
  • For more information, see the Post-Installation Tasks:
    • For standalone installations
    • For clustered installations. 
  • If you had automatic startup configured before starting the upgrade, first remove the symbolic links.
• Review the security suggestions in CSRF.