I am writing a separate post on setting up IBM WebSphere Extreme scale with Commerce, which is going to be really important for you if you have a Commerce site and want to improve your performance. If you are on Commerce V7 then get Feature Pack 1 installed and you are supported and can try WXS out. If you are on WebSphere Commerce V6 and that migration all the way to V7 looks ou of the question right now well you can use WXS, but you are going to need to move from WAS 6 to WAS 6.1. The tasks are in a very loose format documented in the info centre under Migration, which is a little strange because its talking about migrating from a previous version. We are not doing that though because we are on Commerce V6 and we want to change WAS versions. But it is there just open up the Migration topic and you will find out, then read this alongside it.
Environment & Changes
The migration I was doing was under AIX 5.3 and one import aspect is make sure you set the ulimit value to a high level. if you don’t and the default we had on our machines was 2000 the migration will fail. I think its just because of the amount of content that gets moved around, and it just runs out of handlers for it.
So edit the /etc/security/limits file. Add the following lines to the user account that the WebSphere Application Server process runs on: (for migration this is root). It can also help the system increasing the default number of files from 2000 to 10000. if you want you can set these to be unlimited with a -1.
Time to allow for Migration
In order to complete the migration you are going to want to allow at least 10 hours. When I ran the migration on the AIX environment it was a P5 machine with 12Gb memory, so plenty of resources. It took a long time to complete some of these steps, so don’t expect this to be quick. I am still working through the ND steps and that may be even longer.
Stand Alone Migration
The first attempt I made at doing the migration was stand alone by that I mean a single WAS server ran my Commerce instance. In fact had two commerce instances that I wanted to migrate a stage server and a normal server, both existed on the same machine they each ran inside a different WAS profile.
1) Install and then patch WebSphere 6.1 to the latest release
The first thing that you want to do is create yourself a new 6.1 WAS profile. You can do this either on the Command line or using the Profile Manager tool found under <was61_install_path>/bin
Network Deployment Migration
This was much more complicated and straight away when you read the documentation you will have questions. The first being Ok it says to migrate my Network deployment manager first, but if you read the instructions will it be any different to just a stand alone server. Its just not there so instead go into the WAS 6.1 IndoCenter and open this link to migrate the manager.
Ensure that whatever file system you will run the migration on has plenty of space, I would suggest at least 12Gb because of the size of log files that will be created.
1) After installing and patching WAS 6.1 I created a new instance using the instance tool. I gave it the same node and cell settings as the current manager and also the same ports, as I would expect that the nodes connected to it will want to see the same ports available once migrated. The documentation under WAS makes it clear that you want to have the same CELL and NODE names, under the Commerce side it does not.
2) If you read the WAS documentation they expect you to use the migration tool that is in the bin directory, they suggest it is the simplest way. One thing this will do for you is run both the WASPreUpgrade and the WASPostUpgrade commands that are required. In the Commerce documentation you run the actual commands.
3) Stop your ND Manager under V6
4) Create a backup directory, this will be used by the migration to hold the backed up files and then build from.
5) Run the migration tool, the screens are fairly obvious until you get to the ‘What to do with the applications installed‘ , leave this on the default to migrate and install the applications. On the ‘Directory to Install the Applications‘ again leave the default for the default directory of the target version. Depending on what stage you are at you can either disable or not disable the previous ND Manager version for V6. If you don’t just be very careful because if you migrate and then start it, and don’t have the V61 version running you will have problems. On the ‘Port value assignments’ take those over from the current version, which will mean you cannot have both ND managers running.