Latest Service Pack Upgrades to AEM Publish Instances.

[#1]

Hello,

What is the best way to install AEM Service Packs to AEM Publish Instanced; I have 6 publish instances.

One of the ways I am planning to proceed is to:

1. Copy latest service pack content package.zip fie in the ./crx-quickstart/install folder to running author.
2. Monitoring logs for installation complete.
3. Restart AEM Author on Installation complete.
4. Replicate the Service Pack from Author -> Publish.
5. Monitor all logs in all running Publish Servers.
6. Restart AEM Publish, one by one, manually.

What is the most efficient way?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

The recommended way would be to install latest SP on each of your publish instances(one at a time), so that even if any issue occurs, it doesn't impact all of your publish instances.

You also don't need to restart any of your AEM instances post SP installations, as the restart happens(internally &) automatically on the instance on which the SP is installed.

[#3]

It is recommended to install SP's on each instance separately rather than replicating to avoid unnecessary replication slowness as the SP packages are large in size. 

Hope it helps.

[#4]

Replicating the ServicePack forces all publishs to install the Servicepack at the same time, and this is causing a service downtime for your publish instances.

To have a better control about the overall process, I would always recommend to install the Servicepack per publish.

[#5]

Why step 3?  You don't need to restart AEM after installing a ServicePack.

The main thing to be cognizant about for a Publish Service Pack install is you don't want live web traffic hitting that instance so a practical approach here is to remove each Publish one-by-one out of your load balancer and upgrade each individually. Rotating instances in and out of service while doing it as to not impact your production site.