Migrate > Plan to migrate WCS


Overview of a migration project

There are three main phases to a migration project...

  1. Planning phase
  2. Practice phase
  3. Production migration phase

Resources available for planning...


Plan phase

  1. Document the business requirements:

    • Determine if the requirements dictate that use a different WCS business model or edition.

    • Gather documentation on the current site, including...

      • design documents
      • use cases
      • test cases

  2. Document the hardware requirements

    IBM recommends new hardware for migrating the production environment, using the original environment as a fallback environment.

    With new hardware the following tasks can be performed...

    • The new environment can be installed and configured in advance

    • Migrated customizations can be deployed and validated in advance

    • If you are planning to add more hardware, you can use the new hardware for the new site and then use the current hardware to add additional capacity or as additional testing environments. Adequate performance test systems are an important part of a high performance WCS site architecture.

  3. Separate the base migration from the development of new features.

    An exception to this would be if the business users were moving from using WCS Accelerator to using the Management Center.

  4. Know the skills you are going to require for each stage of the migration, for example:

    • A project manager

    • A solution architect who understands the site topology, integration points, and all technologies used.

    • A database administrator

    • Developers experienced in the languages used for any customizations you performed.

  5. Verify the development environments and test environments are synchronized with the version of the code currently in production.

  6. Create a detailed schedule including users, passwords, tasks, owners, timing, check points, validation steps, and roll back plans

    • Determine if any training is required for the technical or business staff, in order to use new technologies, programming languages, or related software.


Practice phase

The practice phase is divided into two or more parts, depending on the business.

Migrate the development environment

  • Attempt to migrate a development environment early in the project, in order to identify changes required to the custom code.

  • It is important to successfully migrate a development environment early if you have developers waiting to write code on the new version of WCS.

Create a new development environment, and then migrate the WCS site as-is. You can regression test the resulting site to see what works and what doesn't, and refine the project plan.

Migrate the test environment

  • Execute end-to-end migration to learn what to expect during production migration.

  • Reduces uncertainty and downtime during migration.

  • Timing each migration activity on the test environment will provide valuable input that you can use to refine the project schedule for the production migration phase.

  • A test staging server is a valuable asset in this phase to test rebuilding the staging server from the test server.


Production migration phase

In the production migration phase, the live WCS system is migrated and switched in to replace the old WCS installation. This activity is usually performed during a planned production outage phase.

The value of the planning and practice phase is realized fully at this time, as technical staff have performed the activities before.

The staging server is rebuilt from the new production server after this outage, using the stagingcopy utility.


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