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I am new to WebSphere. One of the project came to upgrade the existing IBM WebSphere application server 6.1 to WebSphere application server 8.5. Four custom EJB application is running on server. Please guide what the solution to migrate to 8.5 Application Server.

rahul jain
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2 Answers2

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I've handled a few migrations and there are definitely some gotchas to watch out for:

If this is any more critical than a development system, there is a bit of planning you'll need to do. You'll have to bring over any config from the old environment, and you'll have to make sure your applications will work in the new environment.

For the former, WebSphere itself ships with the configuration migration tools, both as command line tools and as a wizard. If you're migrating between installs on the same machine, I would definitely recommend the wizard as it better explains the process and what each setting does. If the installs are on different systems, the command line tools can help with that, but the wizard cannot. The tools to use are both documented at this link although for some reason the article neglects to mention that the wizard is also called migration.sh or migration.bat

If you have a cell topology (a deployment manager managing some number of application servers) you'll migrate the deployment manager first and then the nodes. In that case, the old cell will be disabled, so make sure you take a full backup of the old environment so you can roll back if you have to. The specific procedure for migrating a cell has a good overall order of steps to take, but doesn't mention the wizard. You can replace the "create profile, backup, restore" cycle with the wizard, but the rest of the steps should remain the same.

If it's just a standalone application server, those can usually coexist at the same time so you may be able to keep the old one active while you set the new one up, but I don't think there are any established documentation on how to do that, so to be safe, backup, and plan for some downtime.

Another consideration will be the applications themselves. You will be moving to a new version of WebSphere which supports a new level of Java EE and runs on much newer Java SE, and there are often problems and incompatibilities that come up. For that, I recommend running the binary application scanner with your applications and environment specified and seeing what it reports. If there are any severe issues it flags, it may be worth investigating those before starting the migration to minimize downtime.

Already I can tell that using EJB on WebSphere 6.1, you'll need to make sure that you install the EJBDeploy tool with your WebSphere 8.5 install. It will be automatically used during application deployment. Without that, it's pretty likely the applications won't work because their old EJBs won't deploy. Because of this, I believe you still need to use Java 7 unless you install this fix to get it to run on Java 8. I do not recommend running on Java 6 because that is going out of service by Oracle within a year or so.

So, to summarize:

  1. Use the binary application scanner to see if there are any immediate compatibility issues to start addressing in the applications themselves
  2. Make sure you have the EJBDeploy tool installed along with WebSphere 8.5
  3. Use the migration wizard or command line tools to bring over your configuration and deploy your applications

@Jarid's answer documents everything available relating to WebSphere migration, and is also a good resource.

lwestby
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  • Thanks a lot for the Reply. I have one query. If we install the new instance of Web sphere 8.5 and deploy the application in that , Any issue on that? or we have to follow the migration step? – rahul jain Nov 01 '17 at 06:21
  • No you can just install and deploy if you want to start fresh. The migration is if you have a lot of config you don't want to manually set in the admin console etc. The application scanner might help if your applications have problems running. Don't forget EJBDeploy! – lwestby Nov 01 '17 at 13:28
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WebSphere provides an official migration toolkit to assist with the migration process: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/mw-1701-was-migration/index.html

Jarid
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