Before you begin the upgrade, ensure you have completed the pre-upgrade checklist.

Upgrade process

Upgrade the first REM host

The upgrade-rem command upgrades Rhino Element Manager hosts to new versions.

Note: these REM hosts are likely to be specific to Rhino Element Manager, and not actually running Rhino itself.

Start the upgrade using the following command, replacing <remhost1> with the hostname of the first REM host:

./orca --hosts <remhost1> upgrade-rem packages

This will take approximately 2 minutes.

When executing the upgrade-rem command, orca will perform the following steps on the remote host:

  • check for the existence of any plugins, match them against the specified ones and ask for confirmation to proceed

  • stop the Apache Tomcat web server on that host

  • create a backup of the REM home directory, and related jar files

  • upgrade the package and plugins as appropriate in place

  • restart the web server on that host

At the end of the upgrade process, you will be informed when the operation is complete:

Tomcat started.
REM upgrade completed.
Done on remhost1

If the upgrade failed, you may need to rollback to the previous installation in order to try again.

Missing plugins

As part of the upgrade, orca makes a distinction between plugins which replace an older version of a plugin (the typical case) and plugins which appear to be new addition to the REM installation (a less common case).

It will also detect the case where existing, installed plugins are not included in the bundle, for example when applying a bundle which upgrades REM only, without individual plugins. In this case, orca will prompt you as follows:

These plugins are installed but no replacement appears to be specified: volte-sentinel-element-manager-2.7.0.9.em.jar
Continue anyway? (y/N):
y
Note The upgrade-rem command has an optional --no-prompt flag, which can be used to skip the above prompt. After upgrading the first REM host (and performing the tests recommended in this guide), use the --no-prompt flag to avoid the above prompt when upgrading the remaining nodes.
Note When an existing plugin is renamed across the downlevel and uplevel versions, then the name of the plugin in the existing installation may not match the name of the plugin in the bundle, and you will see a prompt such as above. orca should detect this case automatically (using knowledge of known renames of plugins), and any such failure to detect this case should be considered to be a bug.

Verify that REM is working

Log into the REM web application. Create a new connection to a Rhino host (if not already configured) and connect to it. You should be able to see information about the Rhino node.

If desired, edit the connection to include other Rhino nodes in your deployment, by updating the address field from a single host address to a list of all the required hosts.

Upgrade the rest of the REM hosts

Run the same command as in the "Upgrade the first REM host" section, but passing the remaining (not yet upgraded) REM hosts as --hosts.

As detailed in the above "Missing plugins" section, use the --no-prompt flag to skip the prompt regarding missing plugins.

E.g. if your hosts are remhost1, remhost2, and remhost3, and you already upgraded remhost1, then upgrade the following nodes as follows:

./orca --hosts remhost2,remhost3 upgrade-rem --no-prompt packages

Then perform the same checks as performed on the first REM host, as detailed in the the "Verify that REM is working" section above.

The upgrade is now complete.

Next steps

Follow the post-upgrade checklist.

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