Unless you have a compelling reason to stay running 8.5.1 you should plan to upgrade to at least 20.10 as soon as possible. You will almost assuredly have issues at each of the upgrade points with either UIM or UMP or both and it's much nicer to deal with those issues sooner rather than later. It is also very helpful to know at what step in the process a given issue started to occur so support knows where to start looking.
Unless you are lucky, plan on 6 hours to go from UIM 8.51 to 9.0.2. UMP really depends on your environment but plan another 3 hours for that because if nothing else the UIM upgrade will overwrite your customizations.
Then plan four hours for the UIM 9.0.2 to 20.10 update. And another 3 hours for the UMP update.
I'd suggest doing this in two hops with a day or two in between if possible.
Make sure you pull down all the hotfixes at
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/product-content/recommended-reading/technical-document-index/ca-unified-infrastructure-management-hotfix-index.html relevant to the versions you will be traversing. In particular the robot, ems, and data engine all will get in the way of preventing a clean upgrade.
Original Message:
Sent: 08-13-2020 09:09 AM
From: Asi Aker
Subject: 20.3 release date
Hello my friends,
we are planning to upgrade our 8.5.1 environment.
due to the fact that 20.3 has some significant changes we want to migrate
to this version (i know we have to go through 9.X and so on..)
is their a specific date for the release i can give to my management?
Asi