Contents

Installing Release Control

Pre-Installation

• Before installing Release Control, please consult the Release Control Installation and Setup Guide on the Documentation Center for the detailed process. There are required steps before and after running the installer to complete a working Release Control solution.
• Before you install Release Control version 6.2.2, you must ensure you are running Solutions Business Manager (SBM) version 11.3.1 or later. SBM installations are documented in the SBM Installation and Configuration Guide and SBM upgrades are documented in the SBM readme. If you are upgrading SBM and already have an earlier version of Release Control installed, see Pre-Upgrade Steps.
• An updated set of plugins is available for this release. For details, see the Release Control Plugins Release Notes on the Documentation Center.

SBM New Installations or Upgrades

• If this is a new installation of SBM, download SBM 11.3.1 or later from Support website and then follow the instructions in the SBM Installation and Configuration Guide to install and configure SBM.
• If you need to upgrade SBM to a supported version, follow the instructions in the SBM Release Notes for the version you are upgrading to.
• If you already have SBM 11.3.1 or later configured, you can proceed with the Release Control installation.

Release Control New Installations

After you have verified that SBM is installed or upgraded successfully, download Release Control version 6.2.2 from Support website and follow the installation and configuration instructions in the Release Control Installation and Setup Guide.

Release Control Upgrades

After you have verified that SBM is installed or upgraded successfully, upgrade Release Control according to the instructions in Upgrades.

Installer Components

The installer delivers these components:

• Solution Files – You import the Release Control 6.2.2 solution file in Application Repository. The Release Control solution file contains the following process apps:
  • RLC - Approvals
  • RLC - Environment
  • RLC - Manual Deployment Task
  • RLC - Release Data
  • RLC - Release Package
  • RLC - Release Train
  • RLC - Sample Request
  • RLC - Task Templates
• Framework Files – The framework files augment your underlying SBM installation and enable certain features in the Release Control process apps. The framework files include new templates, images, and code.
• Plugins – The plugins installed with Release Control enable integration with other products for request and deployment information and execution. Administrators configure connection information and other settings in Release Control Administration.
• Release Control SDK Files – The Release Control SDK files installed with Release Control enable you to write your own custom plugins.

Supported Configurations

Detailed information about supported platforms and software configuration is available in the Supported Platform List.

Helpful Links

• Documentation Center
• Latest Plugins Release Notes
• SBM 11.3.1 Release Notes
• SBM 11.4 Release Notes
• Product Overview
• Community website

Third-Party Tools

For more information regarding third-party software copyrights and license information, see the Attribution Report.

Enhancements

The following enhancements are included in this release.

• Performance improvements when working with significant numbers of entities
• Environment whiteout and blackout windows

  You can define periods of time when environment approvals are automatically rejected or approved, called blackout and whiteout windows respectively. Environment owners can:

  • Specify if deployment dates are required when creating an approval rule.
  • Create environment events of different types, including recurring event rules.

  Approvals can be approved or rejected automatically when there is an overlap between blackout and whiteout windows and deployment dates.

• Ability to filter deployment paths and task templates by application

  Deployment Path and Task Template selections are filtered by Application when creating a Release Package.

• New and enhanced plugins

  The following plugin changes have been introduced with this release:

  • Enhanced SBM, ServiceNow, and ZMF Plugins.

  For details, see the Plugins Release Notes What's New section.

Defect Fixes

Several defects were fixed in this release. For the full list see the Knowledgebase.

About Upgrades

The upgrade process consists of the following phases:

• In the installation upgrade phase, you run the Release Control 6.2.2 installer and configure your installation using SBM Configurator. This does the following:
  • Installs the newest versions of the framework files, and configures your installation to use the new files.
  • Installs all supported plugin versions, but does not upgrade the plugins if you are upgrading from Release Control 6.2. After upgrading, an alert in Release Control Administration will indicate if plugin upgrades are available.
• In the solution upgrade phase, you import the new solution file and decide if you will preserve or overwrite any modifications that you have made to the process apps.

Pre-Upgrade Steps

Before you begin the upgrade process:

1. You should finish deploying or cancel execution for as many release packages as you can. However, if you cannot do this or have already upgraded without doing this, you can transition these as needed after the upgrade.
2. If you are using the ServiceNow plugin and have an existing configuration that references multiple ServiceNow tables, you must create a different configuration for each table. After upgrade, the configuration will just contain information for a single table and some configuration settings may be lost for other tables.
3. Backup your existing database before you run the Release Control installer.
4. Back up Release Control, including all plugin jar files, before upgrading SBM.
   1. Backup up the contents of the following directory:

      C:\Program Files\Serena\SBM\Common\Tomcat 7.0\server\default\webapps\rlc\WEB-INF\lib

   2. Backup your existing database before you run the Release Control installer.
5. If you are not on SBM version 11.3.1 or higher, you must upgrade before beginning the Release Control upgrade. For details, see the Release Notes on Documentation Center on the SBM page. The Release Control upgrade will NOT work on earlier versions of SBM.
   Note: If you're upgrading from Release Control 6.0.1, you must manually back up your plugins before upgrading SBM.
6. If you want to preserve any changes you have made in your process apps, use the Compare feature in SBM Composer to create a comparison report. (If you do not want to preserve your changes, or if you did not customize the apps, skip this step). You will use this report to help you merge your modifications into the new apps. For details on using the Compare feature, see the "Comparing and Merging Process Apps" topic in the SBM Composer Guide.
7. If you didn't do this earlier, create a backup of the installation directory structure for SBM on your SBM Application Engine machines.
8. Download the latest version of Release Control from the Support website.

Installation Upgrade

The instructions in these Release Notes are for upgrading your installation from version 6.2 or later. If you are upgrading from a version earlier than 6.2, please contact Support.

Upgrading from Version 6.2 or Later

To upgrade your Release Control framework from version 6.2 or later:

1. Run the Release Control version 6.2.2 installer on the server or servers that have the following SBM components enabled:
   • SBM Application Engine
   • SBM Application Repository
   • SBM Common Services
   Note: If these SBM components are enabled on separate servers, you must run the installer on each server.
   The "Welcome to the Install Wizard" message appears. Click Next to continue.
2. Allow the installation to complete.
   Note: For new installations, the directory defaults to the Program Files\Micro Focus location. For upgrades, it defaults to the existing installation location, typically Program Files\Serena.
3. After the installation is finished, click Configure to launch SBM Configurator.
4. Click Apply to apply the solution files to SBM. This stops the services, updates various configuration files on the server, and prepares the system for use.
5. Click Close to close SBM Configurator, which forces it to start all necessary services.
6. Give the services time to restart, and then log in to Work Center using the following URL:

   http://serverName/workcenter

   Important: Launching Work Center immediately after clicking Apply and closing SBM Configurator is an important part of the upgrade process. This enables SBM Application Engine to import the new framework files.

You have now upgraded the framework files and completed the installation upgrade phase. To upgrade your process apps to the latest versions, you must continue with the next section.

Upgrading the Process Apps

If you want to upgrade your process apps, continue with this section. If you do not want to upgrade your process apps, and prefer to continue working with an earlier version that you have customized, continue to Upgrading Without Promoting New Process Apps.

To upgrade your process apps:

1. After you have finished the installation upgrade phase, launch SBM Application Repository, and then import the Release Control 6.2.2 solution file.

   After importing the new solution:

   • Earlier versions of Release Control solution files are deleted from SBM Application Repository, and the Installed Solutions section shows only the latest version.
   • Snapshots and process apps are available for deployment or promotion.
2. For each process app, choose one of the following options:
   • Compare, merge, and deploy the process apps

     If there are custom modifications that you made to the process apps that you want to preserve, review the comparison report that you generated as part of the pre-upgrade process. Use SBM Composer to compare and merge your changes into the new process apps, and then deploy them.

     Note: You won't get the latest reports unless you promote the new snapshots. See Knowledgebase item S142151 for recommendations on how to resolve this.
   • Promote the process app snapshots
     1. In SBM Application Repository, promote the new versions of the snapshots without comparing and merging, which will overwrite your modifications (if any). Promoting the snapshots places the latest contents of the solution, including all reports, notifications, process apps, and auxiliary table data, onto your SBM Server.
        Important:

        • RLC - Task Templates must be promoted before RLC - Release Train. Otherwise, the default project is not set properly for RLC - Deployable Release Train.
        • RLC - Release Train must be promoted before RLC - Release Package. Otherwise, the RLC - Release Package promotion may fail with Aborted status.

        Promote in the following order:

        1. RLC - Approvals
        2. RLC - Environment
        3. RLC - Manual Deployment Task (optional)
        4. RLC - Release Data
        5. RLC - Sample Request (optional)
        6. RLC - Task Templates
        7. RLC - Release Train
        8. RLC - Release Package

        When promoting, in the Entities tab, do the following:

        1. For all snapshots, select the Merge conflicts check box to preserve changes that you made to the existing application.

           For example, if you want to keep the user roles that you added to an application, select the Merge conflicts check box to preserve them in the target environment after the promotion. If Merge conflicts is not selected, the existing entities will be deleted in the target environment.

        2. For RLC - Release Data only, deselect the Include entity data check box to preserve changes that you made to the default RLC Custom Column auxiliary table entries, Default DU Custom Columns and Default Request Custom Columns. If you do not do this, these entities will be replaced in the target environment with default fields, and you will need to reconfigure the fields as needed.

        3. For RLC - Release Package only, deselect the following reports:
           • RLC Deployment Items Execution Log for Deployment Path
           • RLC Deployment Log for Release Package
           • RLC Deployment Units for Environment
           • RLC DU Execution Log for Deployment Path
           Tip: To do this, select the Reports sub-tab, select Selected, and scroll down to deselect these reports.
     2. Prepare the views for the deployment information tables as follows:
        1. Open a command prompt.
        2. Navigate to the following SBM folder:

           \Application Engine\bin

           For example, here are the commands to navigate to the default location:

           cd\

           cd Program Files\Serena\SBM\Application Engine\bin

        3. Execute the following command and wait for it to complete:

           ttadmin.exe /GenerateViewsAllowDelete

     3. Promote the Release Package snapshot again, this time with the Merge conflicts check box selected and all reports selected in the Entities section.

        The solution views now appear in the Release Package process app as the following tables:

        • RLC Deployment Log
        • RLC DU Execution Log
        • RLC DU Environment (New in this release)
     4. To ensure that all release package metadata is saved in SBM, promote the Release Package snapshot for a third time, make sure that the Merge conflicts check box is selected, and that all reports are selected in the Entities section.
     5. In Application Administrator:
        • Give privileges to all groups for the RLC DU Environment table generated in step c and any other new privileges needed for your implementation.
        • Verify privileges remain set properly for all groups for the other tables:
          • RLC Deployment Log
          • RLC DU Execution Log

        For more information, see "Creating Groups and Assigning Roles and Privileges" in the online Help or Release Control Installation and Setup Guide.

     6. An administrator must initiate the timeline by accessing it once after the upgrade. Until this is done, other users will not be able to access the timeline. See "Initiating the Timeline".

Upgrading Without Promoting New Process Apps

If you decide to upgrade without promoting the new process apps, or only want to promote some of them, ensure you run the installation to upgrade the framework. See Installation Upgrade.

After that you need to do some additional steps to ensure the earlier versions of the process apps work with the upgraded framework. You will benefit from performance improvements and any framework issues that were fixed, but you will not have access to new functionality offered in the new versions of the process apps, such as failure tasks.

See Known Issues in these Release Notes for issues you may encounter and how to work around them.

Plugin Upgrades

An updated set of plugins is available for this release. For details, see the Release Control Plugins Release Notes on the Documentation Center.

Installed Plugins

The versions of the plugins available at the time of release are installed by the Release Control installer.

Existing plugin instances and their configurations will continue to use the versions of the plugins they are set up with. An upgrade notification appears in the Release Control Administration UI and you can choose to manually upgrade instances of the plugin when you are ready. After upgrading plugins:

• If you have existing requests or deployment units for the upgraded plugins, in each release package in the Requests or Deployment Units tab, click Reload Request Data or Reload Deployment Unit Data respectively to pick up any plugin changes.
• If you have existing deployment tasks for the upgraded plugins, in each release package in the Deployment Tasks tab, edit and save the deployment tasks to populate them with the provider data that was stored differently in the prior release.

For additional instructions for specific plugins, see the Release Control Plugins Release Notes.

Additional Plugins

To upgrade custom plugins or to upgrade to a version released after your version of Release Control, see the Release Control Plugins Release Notes Upgrades section.

Related Upgrades

You may need to upgrade SBM before upgrading to this version of Release Control.

• For versions of SBM that support this version, see Supported Configurations.
• For upgrade information for SBM, see the SBM documentation on the Documentation Center.

Troubleshooting Upgrades

After upgrading, you may encounter one of the following issues:

• Some transitions are not working properly, such as associating child release packages to parents.

  Check to see if your target server URLs have changed. If so, you must re-promote or redeploy the process apps in SBM Composer.

• The columns in the Deployment Units and Requests tabs no longer show the fields you had configured in the RLC Custom Columns auxiliary table Default DU Custom Columns and Default Request Custom Columns entities. This means those table entries may have reverted to the defaults. This happens if you upgrade without deselecting the Include entity data check box in the Entities step when promoting the Release Data process app.

  If this occurs, you will need to reconfigure the default custom column entries as needed.

• If after promoting the release package three times using the required settings for each promotion and have assigned all roles and privileges as documented you still have issues with deployment path or deployment path history, some reports may be missing or have missing settings. Some symptoms of these are that you may have a message similar to "Contact Your Administrator" at the top of the page, you may not see any information in the deployment path history, or the deployment units shown may be for all environments instead of for the environment for which they should be shown.

  If this occurs, see Knowledgebase item S142152 for the deployment path report settings. Compare your reports to these and fix them as necessary.