How does the Control-M/Agent Upgrade with no downtime work. |
Legacy ID:KA395416
Customers are facing challenges trying to find the right time to upgrade an Agents that is constantly busy running scheduled jobs. To find a specific time to be able to upgrade in an environment that has dozens of Agent is particularly challenging when each of the Agent's belong to different application groups and has different people responsible for managing the machines. Upgrade with no downtime allows you to upgrade an older release Control-M/Agent running on a machine without having to worry if there are jobs still running. Upgrade procedure will maintain two sets of binaries in the Agent account, which allows the old version agent to complete managing the jobs submitted with older release of the Agent and at the same time allow new jobs to be submitted with the new release of the Agent. After all the job with older release of Agent have completed the New Day procedure will complete the upgrade procedure and remove all files that are no longer necessary.
The steps taken during the upgrade are:
1. Verify that the Control-M/Server version is version 8.0.00 or above.
The older release of the agent requires that it will be connected to Control-M/Server version 8 or above because new job submissions need to be suspended for a short duration while the upgrade procedures in the process. Without proper synchronization between the Server and the upgrade procedure newly submitted jobs may fail to be submitted and cause disruption of the job flow.
2. Extract all installation files to temp location.
3. Backup all existing agent files. 4. Copy all new agent files to agent directory.
The new FP files other than executable file are copied over and replace the older files in the directory tree structure.
5. Place new binaries in the exe_{version} directory.
The new executables are kept in parallel to the previous release executable. The previous release Agent processes are maintained running together with the new release. The previous release processes continue monitoring jobs that were executing prior to the upgrade. This is possible in Unix environment since a soft link is maintain between actual directory with binaries to the expected directory. Additional disk space is required to maintain both executable in parallel until the cleanup procedure is completed.
6. Notify Control-M Server that the upgrade started.
This is necessary in order to suspend any new job submission. Control-M/Server will suspend the jobs submission of new jobs without impacting the job states of already existing running jobs. During this suspend period the old running jobs may still communicate back to Control-M/Server and provide job status updates. These updates will be reflected in the Enterprise Manager. The Server now maintains a new Suspended state of the Agent that identifies that new jobs submission to the Agent cannot be processed at this time.
7. Shut down the old Agent.
The Agent listen and tracking processes are shutdown in order to make room for the new release of the Listen process. This does not shut down the process that are monitoring running jobs. The older release process continue running and monitoring the jobs in execution state until the jobs end. At that point the monitoring process exits.
8. Rename the exe directory to exe_old.
The rename is performed for older releases prior to v8. The upgrade in places supports the upgrade with no downtime for all supported Control-M/Agent releases. Going forward the old exe directory will be a symbolic link and for future upgrades the link will be renamed in the same way.
9. Create a symbolic link called ‘exe’ to ‘exe_{version}fpX’
10. Complete configuration changes.
Additions to CONFIG.dat file and other files used by the Agent are performed at this .
11. Create a file with all running jobs.
Create file “upgrade_running_jobs.dat” of running jobs id’s in the data directory, this file will be used by the new day process to check if these jobs are completed and will then delete the exe_old directory
12. Start the new agent.
The Listen, Tracking, and Routing processes are brought up if needed at this time to continue the Agent services for all the new job submissions.
13. Notify Control-M Server that upgrade ended.
The state of the Agent is changed from Suspended to Discovering in order that the Server will be updated with the latest version information. After the Agent is discovered the jobs eligible for submission will continue to be processed and submitted to the new release of the agent.
14. The exe_old directory will be removed by the new day process.
The upgrade with no downtime currently supports Linux/Unix Agent upgrades from 8.0.00GA onward. For Windows, upgrade of Agents from 9.0.00.100 to higher versions are supported with this feature.
The new design of the upgrade eliminates the need for identifying a maintenance window on every single Agent. It eliminates the need to coordinate between application owners and Control-M administrators. The new design reduces the total cost of ownership and makes administrative task transparent to business needs.
Update with no downtime is supported with base releases and with Fixpacks, but are not supported for point patches. Point patches replace the existing binaries therefore the Agent needs to be down to facilitate the replacement of the binaries. Related Products:
|