TM1 Upgrade/Downgrade Questions

[nanobaka]

Hi,

My organization is running TM1 9.5.0 and I have been assigned the task of upgrading it to 9.5.2. As a newbie I have a few questions regarding upgrading and compatibility issues.

Background:

- We have a development and a production environment. They are both running 9.5.0 on Windows Server 2003 R2 64-bit. Office 2003 is installed on both.
- Users access TM1 applications through TM1Web, while developers and admins do use Perspectives and Architect along with TM1Web. We do not use Contributor or other components.
- Recently we have installed Cognos BI 10.1 on the development server as part of a new project.
- We are looking to use this opportunity to bring TM1 up to 9.5.2, and as our organization is rolling out Office 2010 to all employees, we are thinking about upgrading Office as well.
- Another reason for upgrading is 9.5.2 seems to support BI 10.1 better. TM1 is going to be one of the data sources for our future BI projects, thus we would like to make sure they work well with each other.
- For now we are doing the upgrade on the development environment. If things go well we will perform the upgrade on production.

My questions:

1. According to the TM1 installation documentation, upgrading is basically running TM1 setup program. What about downgrade? For example, if 9.5.2 is causing a lot of problems with our applications and I am forced to downgrade, do I need to uninstall 9.5.2 and reinstall 9.5.0?

2. Our developers and admins have Perspectives and Architect 9.5.0 installed. Do they need to upgrade to 9.5.2 in order to connect to the 9.5.2 server? If they upgrade to 9.5.2, would it create problems when connecting to production, which still runs 9.5.0?

3. For Office, if it is upgrade to 2010 on the server, is there any compatibility issues with clients (Perspectives/Architect) who are still using 2003? Right now our applications are basically a bunch of active forms created in Perspectives in Office 2003 (one person uses 2007). People who are using 2003 will be upgraded to 2010 sooner or later. I understand I still need to test all our applications thoroughly after upgrade, but if there are well known problems it would be nice to know. We can delay the upgrade to 2010, but once we moved to 2010 it is difficult to go back. (Our organization is already rolling out 2010 and IT dept may not have a copy of Office 2003 lying around for us to use.)

Any advice is much appreciated. I am trying to have a plan B ready in case the upgrade went wrong. (I would still get yelled at for messing up the development environment!)

Thanks.

[Martin Ryan]

1. In theory, yes. For the versions you're moving between a downgrade should be as straightforward as reinstalling 9.5.0. However it would be worth planning for a complete disaster, which would necessitate exporting all the dimensions and cubes to text files and having to reimport them that way. Or simply keep a backup of the data directory pre upgrade.

2. This should work however it is frowned upon. Where possible clients and servers should be on the same version. Your point about the production environment is very valid. A new server can connect to an older client, but a new client cannot connect to an older server. I.e. clients who will be working on both servers cannot be upgraded until both production and dev have been upgraded.

3. This should be fine. You might have to turn the ribbon off, but either 2003 or 2010 should work.

Messing up a dev environment should be part of the plan. As long as you've got a way of getting back to where you started then no reasonable boss will do much yelling.

Martin

[mattgoff]

1. In my experience, upgrades are problematic. I always uninstall and reinstall. YMMV. Make sure to zip up a copy of your model before you do anything (including Inetpub if you're a TM1 Web user).
2. We often let our clients lag the server. We've been running 9.5.1 on our servers for while, but most of the clients are still on 9.5.0. Even if you have some concern about having mismatched clients and servers, you can at least phase your rollout-- no need to do a massive upgrade of all clients at the same time you're upgrading the servers. Martin's comment is important: remember that newer clients can't talk to older servers. Also, if you replicate, all servers must be the same version.
3. No experience on 2010, so I can't say.

Matt

[jim wood]

On point 2, at my last project the user clients were running a lower version than the server and it worked fine most of the time. We did however experince crashes from time to time. We tried to flag it with IBM but their standard response is "Update your user software".

Something to keep in mind,

Jim.

[nanobaka]

1. In theory, yes. For the versions you're moving between a downgrade should be as straightforward as reinstalling 9.5.0. However it would be worth planning for a complete disaster, which would necessitate exporting all the dimensions and cubes to text files and having to reimport them that way. Or simply keep a backup of the data directory pre upgrade.

2. This should work however it is frowned upon. Where possible clients and servers should be on the same version. Your point about the production environment is very valid. A new server can connect to an older client, but a new client cannot connect to an older server. I.e. clients who will be working on both servers cannot be upgraded until both production and dev have been upgraded.

3. This should be fine. You might have to turn the ribbon off, but either 2003 or 2010 should work.

Messing up a dev environment should be part of the plan. As long as you've got a way of getting back to where you started then no reasonable boss will do much yelling.

Martin

Thank you for the reply.

We do periodic backup the data directory of our TM1 instances and I definitely will backup everything before I upgrade. I guess I am just a little worried because the inital installation was a lot of work (although it was done by the folks from IBM) that if the upgrade blows up in my face I am not sure a reinstall would return everything back to normal. At least I am going to do it on the development server and leaving production alone.

I probably will leave the clients on 9.5.0 until production is upgraded to 9.5.2.

nb

[nanobaka]

1. In my experience, upgrades are problematic. I always uninstall and reinstall. YMMV. Make sure to zip up a copy of your model before you do anything (including Inetpub if you're a TM1 Web user).
2. We often let our clients lag the server. We've been running 9.5.1 on our servers for while, but most of the clients are still on 9.5.0. Even if you have some concern about having mismatched clients and servers, you can at least phase your rollout-- no need to do a massive upgrade of all clients at the same time you're upgrading the servers. Martin's comment is important: remember that newer clients can't talk to older servers. Also, if you replicate, all servers must be the same version.
3. No experience on 2010, so I can't say.

Matt

I did not think of backing up Inetpub. That makes sense and I will definitely do that.

There are only a handful of people (the developers and admins) who use Perspectives and Architect so upgrading the clients is not a big deal. I just need to make sure new server can talk to older clients and it will be fine.

Thanks.

nb