We need a better way to upgrade SLES 12 to 15 with ZCM installed.

Hi.

With the recent EOL of SLES12, and I assume tons of ZCM primaries still running on that OS, we really urgently need a more streamlined, "professional" way of being able to upgrade/migrate the underlying OS than this:

https://www.novell.com/documentation/zenworks-24.4/zen_sys_disaster_recovery/data/bj3xt3x.html

And that said, we need a better way to backup and restore Zenworks ZCM configuration, also for DR purposes. Ideally, there should be a single button or script that does a full, one-click restoreable backup of all ZCM configuration, that can be reapplied to a fresh installed server.

As for the current stance, that we should use the "Disaster Recovery" documentation to manually run through that tedious (and only party documented... "backup your database" is not a valid documentation in my book)) manual process to backup and restore a primary server:

I frankly don't see why *this* would work and be supported between two different Major SLES Versions, but an inplace Upgrade of the OS on a running ZCM would not be possible.

Especially considering, that with all the recent dockerization of ZCM services, it really shouldn't be impossible to come up with instructions or scripts how to make inplace upgrading a ZCM primary work.

I will start with just trying an inplace upgrade of a 24.4ZCM Primary Server running on SLES12 to SLES15, and see what real world issues I run into.

P.S: The linked docuemntation is yet again not up to it in itself, and is yet again just a huge C&P party, Not only does it suggest to consult the oracle documentation to backup Postgres, it also constantly contains informtation on Windows primary servers, which aren't even a thing any more. 

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    "I frankly don't see why *this* would work and be supported between two different Major SLES Versions, but an in-place Upgrade of the OS on a running ZCM would not be possible."

    In the past there were often LInux OS Upgrade issues related to ZENworks due to major underlying changes to the OS but the backup/restore process did work.  That being said, AFAIK those issues doe not apply to SLES 12.x to 15.x.  So I'm guessing you won't run into issues, but it's similar to Windows Primaries where we never officially supported upgrading the OS but generally there were never any issues around OS Upgrades.

    I submitted Doc Feedback on the type where it says Oracle instead of PostGres for the scenario of someone installing an External DB on the same server as their ZCM Primary. (Never Recommended....but some folks do this....)

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    In the past (ZCM17 timeframe), upgrading SLES underneath led to malfunctioning servers, mostly due to the way Zenworks "installed" rpms. Some of them got silently remove during a SLES upgrade, because they were never properly registered in the RPM DB. The xplat agent did no longer work, also the update agent. It was fixable manually (by finding and manually reinstalling the broken rpms), but a major hassle.

    I *hope* with docker in the mix, maybe it will work better now.

  • 0   in reply to   

    Good morning, 

    Not sure this helps or not, but instead of upgrading the EOL SLES12- SP5 server(s), my customer actually built out new SLES15-SP3 servers as replacement Primary servers, eventually decommissioning the older SLES12-SP5 servers, reclaiming the server hardware, thus bringing the SLES15 servers to the latest support pack level (SP6). In my own lab I have plans for that as well, now that the Zone is 23.4 across the board, I'll be building out another SLES15-SP3 server, then updating it to 23.4, and finally moving to SLES15-SP6. 

    Not sure that's an option for you, but I have seen this approach work in a few cases. 

    Thank you, 

    -DS  

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    Agree, the limitation on OS upgrades is is annoying. That's why I like working with the appliance. I agree this should be simplified for standalone Linux, we have the Windows to appliance migration, something similar would be useful for Linux to Appliance or Linux to Linux.

    Regarding documentation, there is work in process to review the doc's and remove all references to Windows Primaries in the 24.4 documentation and review other things like outdated info, expired links to external resources etc.

  • 0   in reply to   

    Thanks. Of course I'm aware of that possibility, and have done it often.
    Nonetheless replacing a primary currently is a tedious process that shouldn't be necessary in the first place when just upgrading SLES, and like I said, even that process in itself shouldn't be as complex as it currently is. That's the whole point of my post. Idesally, backup/restore of a ZCM Primary shoud be  "one-click", or "one command" process, and not a cumbersome process taking several pages of (incomplete) documentation, plus in-depth knowledge of the whole inner workings.  

    And it's not always easily possible either. There *are* still customers that run on bare metal, and don't have spare hardware around.