Preparing for the Container-Based System Upgrade

As a system administrator, you upgrade your existing Automation Engine system to the latest version. You must meet the necessary requirements, check for incompatibilities between versions and go through a number of preparation steps before carrying out the upgrade.

Also, make sure you have all prerequisites in place before upgrading your system.

This page includes the following:

Checking for Incompatibilities

Before upgrading your system, make sure you fulfill the necessary requirements. Use the compatibility matrix to find the relevant information on supported versions, setup, or prerequisites. Check all CA Automic components and prerequisites for vendor, version or setup information, see compatibility matrix. For more information, see Compatibility Information.

Make sure you check for incompatibilities between two consecutive versions. For more information, see Checking for Incompatibilities. Only new features that might lead to compatibility issues or that should be taken into account when upgrading are listed. All new features of a given Automic Automation version are described in full in the What's New in Automic Automation v21.

Important!

  • Upgrading from a version prior to 12.3 directly to a container-based system is not supported. In this case, you can upgrade your system manually to version 21.0 and then migrate it to a container-based system.

  • Upgrading and rolling back is supported only for major releases, service packs and hotfixes. Do not use custom image versions nor mix different versions.

Downloading the Container Offering

The Automic Automation Kubernetes Edition (AAKE) offering comprises all core and container-specific components, the provided installation customizations for Automic Automation and Automic Intelligent Remediation, as well as a number of Action Packs that are loaded by default. You can download the offering from https://downloads.automic.com/, where you can also see the complete content of the offering.

To download the offering follow these steps:

  1. Log into https://downloads.automic.com/ with your Broadcom credentials and select Automic Automation Kubernetes Edition.

    On the offering download page, download the AAKE offering and request access to the Automic public docker registry.

  2. Once you have access to your company's GCP Service account, download the automic-image-pull-secret.json file and create the secret with the command provided.

    This allows your container platform to pull images from our password protected repository.

The offering zip file includes:

  • All Automic Automation components

  • Automic Automation Helm Chart

    Includes the values.yaml file that you can use to customize the AAKE deployment/installation.

  • Automic Automation Helm Plugin

    Used to monitor the status of the AAKE installation and to run a Helm upgrade for an existing AAKE instalaltion.

Unpack the .zip file on the host in which you have kubectl and Helm installed and open a shell in that folder.

Note: If you do not want to download all the components included in the AAKE offering, you can choose to download the new version of the Helm Plugin and Helm Chart.

Installing the Automic Automation Helm Plugin

You have to install the Automic Automation Helm plugin to manage and monitor the update process. You can also use during the first installation. The Automic Automation Helm plugin requires the Helm Kubernetes Packagemanager.

Use the following commands to install the Helm plugin:

tar zxvf automic-automation-plugin-<version>.tgz

helm plugin install automic-automation-plugin-<version>

The following commands allow you to check the status of the update:

  • update updated the instance in the current namespace
  • status show the status of the instance in the current namespace
  • logs show the logs of the operator

Example

To monitor the installation use the plugin with the following command:

$ helm automic-automation status

Once the installation is complete the status is provisioned, the target and current versions should match the desired version. If this is not the case, check the Troubleshooting section of README.md file found in the Helm chart.

Note: This Helm Plugin works with Linux and can be used from a Linux CLI. If you use a Windows CLI, you might not be able to run all upgrade commands from it and might have to run them directly in Linux.

For more information, see Automic Automation Helm Plugin.

Preparing TLS/SSL Certificates

If you have a self-managed installation, you have to make sure you have all required certificates in place. For more information, see Preparing TLS/SSL Certificates.

Backing Up the Database

Make sure that you back up your database. This allows you to access your database easily in case any issues arise. How you backup your database depends on the database vendor and if you use managed database services and such.

Backing up your database also allows you to migrate to a container-based system using your existing database (version 12.3) instead of starting with a new, empty one.

More information:

Updating the values.yaml File

When upgrading your AAKE environment, make sure you have a backup of your values.yaml file and do not overwrite it; otherwise, the settings that you have already defined for your environment will be overwritten.

You can keep using the values.yaml file that you used for the installation. If there are no other changes, make sure you adapt the version in the spec: section.

Example

spec:
  version: "21.0.0"

If the updated version of the values.yaml file has more changes, make sure you consolidate the new changes with the settings you already had in place.

Optionally, you can define the name of the dedicated serviceAccount that is used by the operator in the operator: section of the values.yaml file. Make sure you create the service account with the relevant permissions in the namespace.

Example

operator:
  serviceAccount:
    create: null # true => will create the service account with the default service account on your behalf.
    name: automic-operator-sa

See also:

Upgrading Container-Based Systems