PTC says that manual rehosting is no longer supported as of Windchill 10.2. Customers must use the rehost utility.
The rehost utility needs to support more use cases.
For example:
Customers running Windchill in SSL with self signed certificates where the certificates are not generated by the Windchill Apache server. Currently the customer must customize the rehost utility to prevent Apache self signed certificates from overwriting the customers self signed certificates.
The rehost utility does not support additional JNDI adapters. It says it does, but it doesn't. The work around is similar to manual rehosting.
The Vault module updates mounts points and copies the vault content from stage to clone. All or nothing. We should be able to update the mount points without coping the content files. Our vaults are on a network share. If the clone starts up and connects to production vaults, we risk the scheduled maintenance ( revaulting, delete unrefferenced files ) corrupting the production vaults.
We copy the content to the target mount points when we export the database. We don't want a 10TB stage location for content just so rehost will update the mount points in the database.
The rehost utility should support master vaults on remote file servers.
I was told by a TS engineer that PTC only tests the rehost utility with a very basic Windchill installation. SSL and remote file servers, network file vaults are all out of scope.
If the rehost utility is the only supported method, then it needs to support more use cases.
