We often get asked by customers "why should I upgrade? I'm pretty happy with my old release". The answer to this question is that over the span of several releases, even minor ones, the benefits that can be obtained by upgrading really increase. This is particularly true for things like performance improvements, and other improvements that impact all environments.
I put together this short document highlight the features of some recent Identity Manager releases, in order to highlight the benefits of upgrading to the most recent release.
Thanks very much for the clarification! Sounds like a good thing that we decided to upgrade to EAP 6 / JDK 7!
Hi Eric - thanks for taking my call earlier. I did confirm that it is not the case that JBoss 5.1 is supported by IDM 12.6SP5 only if upgrading from a prior SP. I'm sorry that you were given incorrect information. It may work, but hasn't been tested by us and not supported. Back to this overall topic, if we receive a case in Support on an unsupported combination such as this, assuming that the version of Identity Manager is supported we will provide best effort support. That means that we will support you until it becomes obvious that the problem is likely due to the unsupported combination. I hope this helps to clarify.
I find it odd that you got a different response from CA than I did. I made it clear that I was upgrading from SP4 to SP5, yet I was told that JBoss 5 was unsupported, as of SP5. I don't suppose your support engineer pointed you to any CA documentation that clearly indicates legacy support for upgrades? There may be other customers that might find such information useful. Thanks!
That is very interesting, because I recently called support to ask this very question. I'm looking at upgrading from SP2 to SP5, and we are currently on JBoss 5.1.0 GA. I wanted a clarification from support so I could plan appropriately, especially since the Bookshelf indicates that you have to "migrate" to an EAP edition by uninstalling IM server and reinstalling to JBoss 6 EAP.
The answer I got from CA Support was that they support JBoss 5.1.0 and these other "unsupported" components when done as an upgrade but not on new installations. In fact, the support engineer I spoke to said that his own VM for supporting SP5 problems is on JBoss 5.1.0 as an upgrade.
In my case, we decided to move to JBoss 6.3 EAP anyway, so it was a moot point.
We successfully upgraded our Test environment from SP4 to SP5, running on Windows Server 2008, JBoss 5.1.0, and SQL Server 2008. We ran SP5 in that test environment for several weeks without any significant problems. In fact, I invested a lot of time and effort exploring some of the new features in SP5, such as improvements to Policy Xpress, Managed E-mail Policies, and Service Desk Integration.
When we went to upgrade our Production environment to SP5, Identity Manager failed to start, and I couldn't figure out why. When I opened a ticket with CA for help, their response was, basically: "we won't support SP5 in that configuration, please refer to the PSM."
As a result, I not only had to roll back Production to its previous SP4 configuration, but I also had to rebuild our Test environment with SP4, too. There was little point in maintaining that configuration, if it wouldn't be supported. I'm now in the process of standing up 5 new Windows Servers with 2012 R2, JBoss EAP 6.2, and SQL Server 2012 in our Test environment, to replace the older servers. I'm being very careful to make sure that all of the components are on the PSM for both SP4 and SP5, to avoid being denied support again.
Thanks Ralph for mentioning this. We have done the upgrade in Dev systems and it is 200X for SQL server. So far i dont see any issue but that means CA will not support if there is an issue ?
What was your experience on this ? I can see Jboss EAP 6 supports Sql Server 200X . Wondering why they removed from the list without highlighting as a big change.
If you're planning to upgrade to SP5, please be sure to pay careful attention the Product Support Matrix. I got burned when I failed to notice that it drops supported status for JBoss 5.X as an application server and SQL Server 200X as a runtime database. I'm dismayed that CA didn't mention this in the Release Notes for SP5.