Updating the Liberty profile
We can update the Liberty profile using the Installation Manager only when you installed it using the Installation Manager method. The Installation Manager also requires the servers are stopped to proceed with an update.
If we did not use Installation Manager to install the Liberty profile, update it manually, for example, by extracting the archive method.
There are typically four types of resources of the Liberty profile that can be updated:
| WebSphere Liberty profile core files | Changes to the core Liberty profile affect all the servers in this profile. |
| Java runtime | Because Liberty does not have its own Java runtime, the updates to this resource affect not only the Liberty profile but any other resources that make use of it. |
| Server instances | Changes only apply to a specific server and any resources that use this server. |
| Applications | Changes reduced only to the application scope. |
Destructive update method
This method overwrites the Liberty files with a new version. The Installation Manager uses this as the default method. It is the fastest to conduct, and if you update the entire Liberty profile, it does not require an administrator to create an additional Liberty profile installation.
Updating the Liberty profile by overwriting the resources
If we choose to update the Liberty profile core or the Java runtime, remember these changes can apply to multiple servers. When you update only the application or server instance resources, these updates are only local to the server.
The drawback of this method is that it is hard to rollback. After the files are overwritten, you lose the previous version. That is why it is important to create a backup of the Liberty profile and any other resources before updating. Consider packaging the server as a way of keeping the old configuration.
If we decided to install the Liberty profile by extracting an archive or another way that does not use the Installation Manager, consider using the non-destructive update method.
Non-destructive update method
The second approach to update the Liberty profile uses the following process:
- Install a new version of the Liberty profile with updated versions of the resources and configurations into a new location
- Stop the old version of the Liberty profile server
- Start the new version of the Liberty profile server
In this method, the old versions of the resources are not overwritten; instead, they stay unused on the server to make it easy to do a rollback of the update. To undo the update, stop the new version of the Liberty profile server and start the old one. Another advantage of this method is that we can update only specific resources in the server that needs to be updated.
A big advantage of this method is that it enables you to conduct a rolling update without an outage of the entire Liberty profile infrastructure. If we use multiple Liberty profile servers for the applications, we can update one server at a time to keep continuous application availability.
Fix pack instructions
All fix packs that update the environment contain detailed instructions. Always refer to these instructions before applying the update.