Performing an In-Place Upgrade

Before executing your upgrade, there are several steps that must be completed. See Upgrading Code and Customizations and Pre-Upgrade Maintenance Tasks for more information. Additionally, make sure that your system meets the requirements for the new version of AEM. See the Upgrade Scope and Requirements section of Planning Your Upgrade for more information.

• Minimum Required Java version: The migration tool only works with Java versions 7 and up. Note that for AEM 6.3, Oracle's JRE 8 and IBM's JRE 7 & 8 are the only supported versions.
  
• Upgraded Instance: If you are upgrading from a version older than 5.4, make sure that you have performed an in-place upgrade to AEM 6.0 by following the procedure described in the 6.0 version of the Upgrade documentation.

Adobe provides a tool that can be used to migrate the repository to the new version of the Oak Segment Tar present in AEM 6.3. It is provided as part of the quickstart package and is mandatory for any upgrades that will be using TarMK. Upgrades for environments that are using MongoMK do not require repository migration. For more information on what the benefits of the new Segment Tar format are, see the Migrating to Oak Segment Tar FAQ.

The actual migration is performed using the standard AEM 6.3 quickstart jar file, executed with a new -x crx2oak option which executes the crx2oak tool in order to simplify the upgrade and make it more robust. To determine the command that you should run, use the following command:

Where <<YOUR_PROFILE>> and <<ADDITIONAL_FLAGS>> are replaced with the profile and flags listed in the following table:

Where:

• mongo-host is the MongoDB server IP (for example, 127.0.0.1)
  
• mongo-port is the MongoDB server port (for example: 27017)
  
• mongo-database-name represents the name of the database (for example: aem-author)

You may also require additional switches for the following scenarios:

• If you are performing the upgrade on a Windows system where Java memory mapping is not handled correctly, please add the --disable-mmap parameter to the command.
  
• If you are using Java 7, add the -XX:MaxPermSize=2048m parameter just after the -Xmx parameter.

For additional instructions on using the crx2oak tool, see Using the CRX2Oak Migration Tool. The crx2oak helper JAR can be manually upgraded if needed, by manually replacing it with newer versions after unpacking the quickstart. Its location in the AEM installation folder is: <aem-install>/crx-quickstart/opt/extensions/crx2oak.jar. The newest version of the CRX2Oak migration tool is available for download from the Adobe Repository at: https://repo.adobe.com/nexus/content/groups/public/com/adobe/granite/crx2oak/

If the migration has completed successfully, the tool will exit with an exit code of zero. Additionally, check for WARN and ERROR messages in the upgrade.log file, located under crx-quickstart/logs in the AEM installation directory, as these could indicate non-fatal errors that occurred during the migration.

Check the configuration files beneath crx-quickstart/install folder. If a migration was necessary these will be updated to reflect the target repository.

A note on datastores:

While FileDataStore is the new default for AEM 6.3 installations, using an external datastore is not required. While using an external datastore is recommended as a best practice for production deployments, it is not a prerequisite to upgrade. Due to the complexity already present in upgrading AEM, we recommend performing the upgrade without doing a datastore migration. If desired, a datastore migration can be executed afterwards as a separate effort.

While the provided crx2oak profiles should meet the needs of most customers, there are times when additional parameters will be necessary. If you run into an error during your migration, it is possible that there are aspects of your environment that require additional configuration options to be provided. If so, you will likely encounter the following error:

Checkpoints won't be copied, because no external datastore has been specified. This will result in the full repository reindexing on the first start. Use --skip-checkpoints to force the migration or see https://jackrabbit.apache.org/oak/docs/migration.html#Checkpoints_migration for more info.

For some reason, the migration process needs access to binaries in the datastore and is unable to find it. In order to specify your datastore configuration, include the following flags in the <<ADDITIONAL_FLAGS>> portion of your migration command:

For S3 datastores:

Where /path/to/SharedS3DataStore.config represents the path to your S3 datastore config file and /path/to/datastore represents the path to your S3 datastore.

For File datastores:

Where /path/to/datastore represents the path to your File Datastore.

If using S3:

To execute the upgrade, it is important to start AEM using the jar file to bring up the instance.

Note that starting AEM from the start script will not start the upgrade. Most customers start AEM using the start script and have customized this start script to include switches for environment configurations such as memory settings, security certificates, etc. For this reason, we recommend following this procedure to determine the proper upgrade command:

Once the in-place upgrade process has been completed, the updated code base should be deployed. Steps for updating the code base to work in the target version of AEM can be found in Upgrade Code and Customizations page.  

See Post Upgrade Checks and Troubleshooting.