User Impact of AEM Upgrade from 6.3 to 6.5.8

[Raider52]

Hello All:

Our AEM Admin team has advised of a pending AEM Upgrade from 6.3 to 6.5.8.  Are there any AEM users who has experience with this upgrade, and can share any concerns or issues our AEM user base should be aware, or prepared for.  It is important that this upgrade goes well for the company.

Thanks,

Al

[Asutosh_Jena_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Raider52 

Adobe documentation captures all the scenarios for AEM upgrade.

Please refer to it at [1]. On a high level, the changes are:

1. Upgrading the AEM instance - you can do either in-place upgrade or fresh install approach based on your content size.
2.  
3. Upgrade your artefacts by compiling against 6.5 uber jar.
4.  
5. Test and fix any issues due to deprecated features/overlaid capabilities change.
6.  
7. From 6.3, as part of sustainable upgrades process, there is a repository restructuring that can be done (not mandatory). Refer to it at [2]
8.  
9. Process on how to rollout the changes to production.

If this is hard, adobe offers a backward compatibility mode from 6.3 with which you can run a 6.3 aem artifact on a 6.5 instance. Read more at [3] Pattern detector is a mechanism provided by Adobe to easy identify of possible problems that will come up during upgrade by validating against deprecated features and overlays. Refer more at [4]

AEM 6.5 is compatible with Java 8 and 11. Refer to [5]

[1] - https://docs.adobe.com/content/help/en/experience-manager-65/deploying/upgrading/upgrade.html

[2] - https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-65/deploying/restructuring/repository-res...

[3] - https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-65/deploying/upgrading/backward-compatibi...

[4] - https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-65/deploying/upgrading/pattern-detector.h...

[5] - https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-65/deploying/introduction/technical-requi...

We have already migrated multiple projects from AEM 6.3.x to 6.5.x version and it was really a smooth migration without any impact. So it should be pretty easy for you if you are following the above steps as mentioned in the Adobe documentation.

Hope this helps!

Thanks!