Performing staged upgrade and rolling upgrades
SDL Tridion Sites supports a staged upgrade from all supported upgrade versions:SDL Web 8.5 or SDL Tridion Sites 9 If you are upgrading from SDL Tridion Sites 9, you can also perform a rolling upgrade within each stage where you upgrade the individual software components in within each environment, one by one. This topic summarizes the steps in the upgrade process when doing both a staged and rolling upgrade.
The order of the staged upgrade
A staged upgrade is where you upgrade the different parts of your infrastructure at different times. In a staged upgrade, you must upgrade Content Manager environment before you upgrade your Content Delivery environments. After that, you can upgrade the individual Content Delivery environments in any order you wish. Most organizations upgrade the product using a staged upgrade.
When considering a staged upgrade, note the following:
- The mixed-version setup is supported only as a temporary setup, and with the intent of making your upgrade process easier. Depending on the complexity of your upgrade project, you may need to have a mixed-version setup in place for days, week or maybe even longer. But regardless of your specific timeline, your end goal and intent must be to upgrade your entire infrastructure. SDL Tridion Sites explicitly does not support a mixed-version setup in production beyond the duration of your upgrade project, as a long-term solution.
- A staged upgrade is only possible if you are upgrading a system in which Content Manager software components are installed on a different machine than Content Delivery software components.
- If the upgraded Content Manager version introduces new functionality that also requires a newer version of Content Delivery, the new functionality is effectively unavailable until you complete your upgrade project. Likewise, the first step in solving any issues you encounter while your infrastructure is in a mixed-version state, is to complete the upgrade project.
Rolling upgrades within each stage
In a rolling upgrade, you separately upgrade the parts of a scaled-out environment so that you can minimize system downtime and guarantee that the upgraded parts of an environment continue to work while you continue with the upgrade. In particular, the rolling upgrade means first upgrading the shared database and then upgrading the various application servers. A rolling upgrade is intended to support complex upgrades of scaled-out infrastructures by enabling you to gradually upgrade the various application servers.
- You can only perform a rolling upgrade if you are upgrading from SDL Tridion Sites 9.
- New functionality introduced in SDL Tridion Sites 9.1 cannot be used until the rolling upgrade of the Content Manager environment is complete.
The topics that follow explain the upgrade process within each stage, including the option to do a rolling upgrade.