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Abstract - This article discusses how to manage your maintenance
installation
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Topic 6. Maintenance and quickfixes
6.4 Managing Maintenance installation
The advantages of keeping your installed Portal software at a current
maintenance level are many. Foremost is the reduced risk of encountering a
problem that has already been discovered and fixed in a later services release.
You can also take advantage of performance, stability and functional
enhancements already incorporated in the software.
An optimal Portal infrastructure will consist of a staging environment that
is essentially a duplicate copy of the production environment available for
in-house quality assurance (QA) testing. In order to ensure this
consistency between environments, as many components as possible should be the
same between the staging and production server, including the hardware (storage
devices, network connectivity, memory, and CPU), as well as the versions and
fix levels of all the software components: operating system application server,
webserver, database, security servers, and any others you have in your
environment. If your production environment runs on a cluster of Windows
servers, then the staging environment should be the same.
It is recommended that thorough testing of any maintenance patch be done
first on the staging server to ensure it does not introduce any problems or
unexpected results. Before being applied to the production
environment, it is a good idea to become familiar with the steps required to
perform the update to prevent problems on the production site. For
practice, the update can be de-installed and reinstalled several times on the
staging environment or other testing system if one is available.
| Important: It is critical to
carefully maintain a list of installed fixes and fixpacks you have installed on
each of your machines. It is good practice to keep backup copies of all
the fixes that have been applied on a different machine from your Portal
server. |
6.4.a Portal Update Installer
As was the case in earlier Portal releases, the Portal Update Installer
(PUI) is the tool used to apply WebSphere Portal maintenance. The link
to the Portal 6.1 specific Update Installer tool is on the recommended fixes
page mentioned above, and can also be accessed directly from the URL below:
IBM - WebSphere Portal Update Installer
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=688&uid=swg24006942#6.1
With Portal 6.1, you have a choice to use either a platform specific version
of the tool or a universal update installer. The platform
specific tools include a Java™ runtime environment so that you are able to
invoke the graphical "Wizard" interface without setting the necessary
environment variables first as is required with the universal update
installer.
Instructions for how to use the IBM WebSphere Portal Update Installer
command line and graphical Wizard to apply updates are included in the README
that comes with the Portal Update Installer package in the doc folder.
6.4.b How to determine if an interim fix needs to be reinstalled after
application of an Fix Pack or Refresh Pack.
Before you apply a Fix Pack or Refresh Pack to your Portal server, use the
PUI to obtain a list of fixes you currently have installed. The PUI is
the recommended method of viewing the list of installed Portal Fixes, although
it is possible to view the event.history file in the directory
<WP_root>/version/ to extract what has been installed.
The syntax to show the list of fixes on the test server used for this
project is as follows:
C:\IBM\WebSphere\PortalServer\update> updatePortal -
fix
-installDir
"C:\IBM\WebSphere\PortalServer"
The syntax to show the list of installed fix packs on the test server would
be:
C:\IBM\WebSphere\PortalServer\update> updatePortal
-fixpack
-installDir
"C:\IBM\WebSphere\PortalServer"
For every Interim Fix included in the resulting list, you must determine if
that fix is included in Fix Pack or Refresh Pack that you are applying.
You can do this by searching the Fix list for WebSphere Portal Version 6.1 at:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=688&uid=swg27008899
If the fix is not in the Fix Pack or Refresh Pack, then you will need to
confirm that the copy of the fix you have can be applied again on top of the
Fix Pack or Refresh Pack you are installing. Often, the README for the
fix will show what service levels of WebSphere Portal this fix can be applied
on top of. If your Pack or Refresh Pack is not in the README, then
consult the fix web page. If you are still unable to determine if a
newer version of the fix is available, then check with IBM support to determine
if a newer version of the fix is available.
6.4.c Installing Portlet Updates
This section shows how to install updates to Portlets.
For updates to Portlets downloaded from the Portlet Catalog, if there are
special instructions for installing the Portlet, the special instructions may
be included in the downloaded zip package or in the 'Support' section of the
portlet's catalog entry in the WebSphere Portal Catalog, as shown in the
following figure:
If there are no special installation instructions in the Deployment and
Installation section of the Sales and Support page, then the default portlet
update instructions can be followed. These are the same instructions
that would be used if your portal developer updated a portlet through RAD or
other IDE to make the changes to the java source file and then provided you
with a new portlet war file, containing the update.
The default method of applying an update to a porlet is to use the Portal
Administration portlet: Administration > portlet management
> web modules > and search for the portlet's web module that
you want to update. Once you find the web module that you want to
update, click on the web module's update button: 
to apply the update.
An example for this is as follows:
In our example, we demonstrate applying an update to the GoogleGadget
Portlet.
- Find the web module for the GoogleGadget Portlet the in the Portal
Administration portlet: Administration > portlet management
> web modules and click on it's update button as
can be seen in the following figure:
- On the next screen, browse to the location of the updated war file and
click Next:
- In the following step, you have the opportunity to change some of the
Portlet's configuration before clicking Next:
- If the web module update is successful, you should see the success
message as shown in the following figure:
There is further information available on this topic in the InfoCenter
article “Updating Web modules, portlet applications, and portlets”:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wpdoc/v6r1m0/topic/com.ibm.wp.ent.doc/a
dmin/portletapps_update.html
6.4.d Applying Portal Maintenance updates in a clustered environment
In a production environment, applying portal maintenance to a cluster of
portal servers typically involves applying the update to each node in the
cluster, one at a time. If possible, apply maintenance during one of the least
busy times of the day or week.
If it is possible for only half of the servers in your cluster to carry the
lighter than normal load during the off peak time, then to maintain 24x7
availability, then leave half of the nodes running and stop the node agents and
Portal servers on the other half. The node you choose to install the fix
on first is arbitrary. After applying the maintenance to the stopped
nodes, bring them back online and repeat the process for the other nodes in the
cluster.
If there are special instructions to apply a particular fix pack and interim
fix to a cluster, the instructions are provided with the corrective service
package.
If a portal update also requires an update to the underlying WebSphere
Application Server, then it is important to note that the update must be
applied to the Deployment Manager of the cell before the other participant
nodes. If the corrective service updates a previously deployed
enterprise application, then you will be instructed to disable deployment
manager auto-synchronization while the fix is being applied to all the nodes in
the cluster. If the portal update requires an update to the underlying
WebSphere Portal databases or other supporting software such as databases
servers, then refer to the specific instructions provided with the update.
The WebSphere Portal InfoCenter contains additional information on applying
maintenance to a Portal Cluster at:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wpdoc/v6r1m0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.w
p.ent.doc/plan/clus_maint.html