Performing a rolling upgrade

Performing a rolling upgrade on your production PolicyCenter cluster requires extensive testing to minimize the risk of deploying the upgrade changes in a production environment.

The following list describes the steps involved in performing a rolling upgrade.

Step	Task
Prepare	Verify that your environment is set up correctly for a rolling upgrade.
Test	Test the PolicyCenter upgrade changes in a test environment before you implement the changes in a production environment.
Upgrade	Upgrade the servers in your production environment, one by one.

Rolling upgrade terminology

Guidewire uses the following term definitions in the discussion on rolling upgrade.

Instance

An individual PolicyCenter server running in a VM (Virtual Machine) or JVM (Java Virtual Machine) or stand-alone PolicyCenter server.

Test instance

A PolicyCenter instance with the same data model and EAR/WAR build file as that used on a production instance. The test cluster does not need to have the same number of test instances as the production cluster. However, there needs to be at least two instances in the test cluster to be able to test the rolling upgrade process.

Guidewire recommends that you place the servers in the test instance in production mode so as to replicate your production environment as much as possible.

Production instance

A member of the production cluster accessed and used by external PolicyCenter users.