Clone the instance & incremental Migration of AEM 6.2

[aemanonymous]

What is the best way to take a clone of an AEM 6.2 instance.(it could be Author or Publish instances). Is this article still valid for AEM 6.2. https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kb/CloneInstance.html

If I create a new DEV instance from a 5.6.1 instance production backup (sits on a separate Data center), perform in-place upgrade, apply code fixes to support AEM 6.2. Take a clone of the DEV instance to QA, Preprod, PROD respectively. Once the new PROD environment is stable with code fixes, perform an incremental migration to handle delta content and make live traffic to AEM 6.2.  The respective users/usergroups& ACLS in relevant environments will be deployed as packages excluding the user token information. 

Do you foresee any risks in this approach?

[Opkar_Gill · Accepted solution]

Hi,

for cloning an instance most of that page is not valid, in the page it specifically mentions cq5. 

If you clone an AEM 6.2 instance, you should delete the file "sling.id.file" and also reset the cluster id, you can find out how in this page [0] in the "Configuring a Shared Data Store"

The following steps are still valid from the page you referenced.

After this procedure has finished, following list of items need to be checked:

• if running on the same machine, please change the port of the cloned instance
• once the instance has been started, check configurations and adapt if needed:
  • replication agents
  • admin passwords
  • custom application-specific configuration settings

As for your migration approach, I haven't used it or heard of that approach. I just completed a migration from 5.6.1 to 6.2 and we regularly took clones of production and attempted to upgrade these, the upgrade process is an iterative process so you may have to rebuild or trash and restore your instance frequently, so ideally you would use regular clones of your prod environment until you have your process down and can perform the upgrade without issues.

Regards,

Opkar

[0]https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/deploy/platform/data-store-config.html

[aemanonymous]

Opkar Gill wrote...

we regularly took clones of production and attempted to upgrade these, the upgrade process is an iterative process so you may have to rebuild or trash and restore your instance frequently, so ideally you would use regular clones of your prod environment until you have your process down and can perform the upgrade without issues.

Regards,

Opkar

[0]https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/deploy/platform/data-store-config.html

Thanks for the clarification Opkar.

Kindly let me know where have you tried regularly upgrading the clone of production; is it in local/lower environment or in production server itself?

Thanks

Paul 

[Opkar_Gill]

Hi Paul,

we would always get a copy of the prod repository and copy it to a lower environment(change passwords etc) and test the migration.

Regards,

Opkar

[aemanonymous]

Thanks Opkar