Upgrade Cognos BI 10.1 to 10.2.1

[edysuranta]

Dear Experts,

We are going to upgrade Cognos BI from 10.1 to 10.2.1.
What is the best method to upgrade?
We are running on Solaris 10, DB2 for database.

Please share if you have any documentation related to upgrade.

Really appreciate for every comments.


Thank You
Edy

[AussiePete2011]

Hi there

We ran this as a project as we have 3 environments and 5 servers including DQM, Indexing and BSP IVC.

We installed 10.2.1 servers and clients in parallel with 10.1.1
Increment all ports in 10.2.1
New db2 schema for 10.2.1 CS, NS, and AS
Temporary website for testing purposes until final cutover

We then ran full weekly exports and a final export of the content store after running consistency check.
We also had the advantage of BSP MetaManager Report Validator to generate a baseline of working and non-working reports.
We documented the packages using BSP MetaManager
All FM packages were backed up
All Transformer models were backed up
All Automated scripts we ran to report and cube builds were replicated for 10.2.1 and disabled.

Once we had a parallel working 10.2.1 we ran tested with the assistance of the development team to confirm critical and major reports were working.  If there were any reports that were failing then these would be prioritised and actioned to be fixed and re-tested

Please note that we disabled scheduling so as not to affect the source systems in 10.2.1

Functionality was tested across the various browsers as we have IE 8 through 11, Chrome and Firefox. 
Every problem was documented in Confluence and any issues that were found to be problematic was raised as a PMR.

We worked through a dev cycle until we were confident that once we cut-over, there would be no major issues to deal with.
On the cut-over, we ran final checks and organised testers for the weekend cut-over

On the Friday at 5 PM 10.1.1 was made read-only so no further changes were accepted.
A delta export was created
On Saturday, 10.1.1 was turned off and the webserver site was redirected to 10.2.1
10.2.1 was loaded with the entire weekly export and the delta
We had testers come in and confirm all critical and major reports were functioning

We then began upgrading all FM and TX models
Client software was configured on all DEV workstations.
Models were opened and confirmed to be successful (second pass)

All modifications and changes were documented and sign off from business sort on the Sunday.

We still have some PMR's open and we've noticed there are some issues with browsers after moving to complete 64bit version

That's a summary of how we went about the work over a 2 month period.
Hope this helps
Cheers
AussiePete

[Francois51]

Hi edy, I think AussiePete's method is a very good one and I did almost the same thing when I moved from 8.4 to 10.2.1.
Except that My environnement is a little bit smaller and that I did ti all by myself.

Also, you can chose to make a fresh install on a brand new server. The drawback is that you have to change the url used to access COGNOS when you go live (which can be done easily with a GlobalPolicyObject in ActiveDirectory), unless you used DSN alias.

Also you can use LifeCycleManager (which has the advantage of being a free IBM Tool) to validate reports against both environements and test for performences issues.

I found these links very usefeull as well :
http://fr.slideshare.net/senturus/installing-cognos-10-tips-and-tricks-from-the-trenches

and

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/upgrade_and_migration/bi/page628.html