Skip to main content
M
mmuth1-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 13, 2014
Question

Rehosting to New O/S

  • January 13, 2014
  • 7 replies
  • 1258 views

I've recently taken over as the system administrator of our Windchill 9.1 system, which went live last year. We are getting ready to move all of our Windchill virtual servers from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008. We currently have a rehosting process that does not use the rehosting utility, but has scripted a good portion of the rehost, and are not planning to move to the rehost utility for this move.


Doesanyone have best practices to share in this scenario?


Thanks,


Mary-Ann


KAPL

7 replies

B
BenLoosli23-Emerald III
23-Emerald III
January 13, 2014
Are you just doing OS upgrade to new hardware?

That is an easy upgrade to accomplish.

1. Build the new operating environment, Windchill and options OOTB, on the new hardware/OS.

2. Backup the old Oracle/SQL database and LDAP.

3. Copy the vaults to the new server, unless they are on a LAN mounted disk/diskarray.

4. Copy the modified *.xconf files to the new system.

5. Import the Oracle/SQL and LDAP dfatabases into the new system.

6. Fix any references to the old computer names in the *.xconf files.

7. Run Xconfmanager.

8. Start the new system and verify vault locations.

9. Test process.

10. Install the new Windchill components as services.

11. Give users the new URL and set the URL for Pro/E in the config.pro file.


R
RajeshBalasunda1-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 13, 2014
Mary,

We did the OS 2008 conversion for our Production cluster environment. This is what we did.


1. Created a new Virtual Server with OS 2008 (Server Name - <original name=" -=" 2008=">)

2. Copied all the required files from the Original server to this new server. Vault files were synchronized between the original copy date and the go live date.

3. Shut down the Original Server. Take it off network.

4. Renamed the OS 2008 server to the actual name of the original server.

5. Start Windchill on OS 2008 server.

Thanks!

Rajesh Balasundaram | Corning Cable Systems | o 817.431.7337 | c 817.676.2868 | IT Site Leader - Keller | Windchill System Admin
S
sdrzewiczewski10-Marble
10-Marble
January 13, 2014
I sent this to just Mary-Ann by mistake.


One of the important things my company learned a long time ago was to not change the name of the Windchill server. When one of our first upgrades was performed, new hardware was used and the name of the serve was changed to something better than the original name, but unfortunately all documents and emails people had created with links to Windchill objects were now broken.

When we recently upgraded hardware and OS (2003 -> 2008 R2) we initially setup an alias in the etc/hosts file on the computer so it thought it was the old server name. When Windchill was installed on that computer we used the alias name, not the physical machine name. When we did our cutover, we renamed the old server, added a CNAME entry and removed the etc/hosts entry.

Are you upgrading your database server, or just your application servers?

Steve D.

P
patrickchin20001-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 13, 2014

Hi Mary-Ann,


I have to ask a couple of questions:



  1. What database software are you using, SQL Server or Oracle?

  2. Are using a Windows 2008 upgrade software?

  3. You try to mirror/rehost then upgrade the Windows OS to dev and test first before you do this on production

You don't have to perform a complete mirror of production, if you are just upgrading your OS to Windows 2008. It becomes more difficult to copy the Windchill vaults and temp if they are quite large. Additionally, if you have customization, redeploy your specific build. If you are creating a new image and follow the rehost instructions.



  1. Don't forget to change the aliases in your DNS server for the right IP's for the application server, database server, ESI serverand CAD workers right before the switch over if you are creating a completely new server.

  2. SQL Server Database can be upgraded or do you plan to export and import back to SQL Server 2008.

  3. Or Oracle Database can stay at the same version (11g) with just updating the OS.

That's my advice,


Patrick

M
mmuth1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
January 14, 2014

At this point in time we are upgrading to new Virtual server hardware with 2008 R2.Our database will remain the same -we just migrated to Oracle 11g recently, and another group is responsible for maintaining/upgrading Oracle.


After the server upgrade, we will start working on upgrading to Windchill 10.2


Mary-Ann

B
BenLoosli23-Emerald III
23-Emerald III
January 14, 2014
As a note, you will also need to upgrade Wildfire/Creo at the same time as there are no versions that work with 9.1 and 10.2. Or upgrade to 10.0, then Creo2, then 10.2, which is what I am doing.

D
daniel.garcia1-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 16, 2014
I think last versions of Creo 2 can do the trick. That's the route we plan to take.

Best regards

Daniel Garcia

Enviado desde mi iPhone

> El 14/01/2014, a las 15:28, "Loosli, Ben H" <-> escribió:
>
> As a note, you will also need to upgrade Wildfire/Creo at the same time as there are no versions that work with 9.1 and 10.2. Or upgrade to 10.0, then Creo2, then 10.2, which is what I am doing.
>
>
Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement