How to upgrade Sitecore CD environment?

Question

In our production environment we have one single CMS server and two CD servers. These two CD servers share a Web + Security DB, they have no access to the Core database.

We wish to begin the upgrade path from 6.2 rev 100507 to 6.4.1 Update 3. The first update to apply is go to 6.3.0 Initial Rev.

Are there any details on how we would go about upgrading these two CD environments? The Sitecore document "Configuring Production Environments" briefly mentions it, but the detail is a bit lacking to say the least:

If you remove the content of the /sitecore folder, please beware that you will not have access to Sitecore backend anymore on the content delivery servers. This may potentially complicate upgrading because there will be no access to the Sitecore Installation Wizard for update deployment. In this case you will need to manually update Sitecore by moving the file assets from the update packages to the file system of the content delivery servers.

But there are no further details on how to achieve this. I have opened up the update package to find these folders:

• properties
• metadata
• installer
• deletedfolders
• deletedfiles
• changeditem
• changedfiles
• addeditems
• addedfolders
• addedfiles

Most of these files seem to be DIFF files especially for Sitecore, with no indication of how these could be applied to the server. (i.e. it's not just a case of dragging the files over).

I imagine this must be a common scenario, are there any guides that can be followed for it, or does anyone have a suggestion for the best way to go about this?

Answer 1

That note is specifically talking about the file system files as you mentioned. A Sitecore package contains serialized Sitecore items in flat files as well as other file system files, such as DLLs, code files (ASPX, ASCX, JS), etc. As you've done, un-zip the package and look at the folders. Pay attention to the *folders and *files folders:

• deletedfolders
• deletedfiles
• changedfiles
• addedfolders
• addedfiles

Any deleted folders and files can be deleted. Changed files need to be deployed as they're changes to existing files. Added folders and files can be added.

I would recommend to proceed in this process though:

1. Duplicate the CD environment to a "new" CD environment (including duplicating Core and Web DBs).
2. Based on the notes above, update the file system with changed folders and files.
3. Create a new publishing target in the CM instance to publish to the "new" Web DB.
4. Install the update on the CM end so you get any new/changed Sitecore items.
5. Once complete, publish from CM to your new CD instance based on the new publishing target you made.

If it helps, I also wrote a blog post a while back on the general Sitecore Upgrade Strategy. It might not answer any of your specific questions but it might help you organize.

Answer 2

For upgrade you need to have installation wizard in the folder sitecore\admin\Wizard You may want to copy this folder from CMS to CD, install package and then remove folder(or leave- it's not critical)

Answer 3

The update package contains the information required but not in an immediately usable format. The deleted/changed/added folders tell you what files you need to change, but as the files themselves are encoded in these diff files there is no simple way to use them (presumably Sitecore has some code embedded to extract the data).

The solution I found was pretty simple, I used the update package to make a list of what files I would need to delete, and what files would need to be added from the target version (replacing any files that existed if necessary). I then took the full installation ZIP file for the target version, unzipped it and took the files from there.

This will largely just amount to replacing files in the \bin and \App_Config folders, the largest amount of changes are in the \sitecore folder but that can almost entirely be stripped out for a CD environment as it mostly isn't required.

WinMerge is a particularly useful tool if you want to check at the end of an upgrade that nothing has been missed between your environments.