About upgrading

Before beginning any upgrade of Tridion Sites, read this section carefully to understand the overall process and things to consider. Note that RWS strongly recommends against attempting an upgrade on your own and that you first contact your RWS representative.

RWS enables multiple ways to upgrade your product, including staged and rolling upgrades. This topic and the related topics on the specific scenarios will help you understand how to proceed given your current implementation in relation to Tridion Sites 9.6.

All-at-once

You can, of course, upgrade all your environments and software components at the same time. This type of upgrade involves greater risk and downtime, and is therfore not common practice.

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.

Rolling upgrade

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.

Upgrade with a move to a new environment

There may be times when the hardware on which you are running an existing software component is unsuitable for use with the upgraded Tridion software. It could be that the hardware is not supported by the new version or is perhaps generally outdated. Whatever the reason, you will want to upgrade your hardware in addition to your software.

If your upgrade of Tridion Sites involves new hardware or an operating system upgrade, you are technically doing a fresh install of the software on the new hardware; however, functionally, you are still doing an upgrade. In most cases, there are customizations, configurations, and other settings from the old environment that need to be moved to the new machine. Always follow the process outlined in this section and the upgrade instructions, not the installation instructions.

Upgrade with a move to the Cloud

The upgrading documentation describes how to upgrade each part of your Tridion Sites system to the Tridion Sites 9.6 on-premises release of Tridion Sites. When upgrading, you might also wish to move some or all parts of your on-premises Tridion Sites instance into the Cloud. Moving into the Cloud is a big decision with multiple decision points, but it also offers considerable benefits.

To discuss this option, contact your contact your RWS representative.