Question

In order to upgrade a Parallels Business Automation (PBA) 5.4 installation to PBA 5.5, it is necessary to to migrate the existing PBA installation from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008.

How can this be done?

Answer

The general procedure is described in the documentation:

PBA_5_4_Migration_Guide_for_Windows.pdf

On running configure.pl for the first time (after installing the product on the destination sever), it is important to specify any values that differ from the source values:

http://download.pa.parallels.com/pba/5.4/doc/60646.htm

NOTE! Do not reboot the system when the script asks to do so:

"It is strongly recommended to restart the system. Restart? [yes/no]:"

Type "no" here to let configure.pl finish the permissions setup and reboot the system after the script finishes (this information should be included to the documentation, and is recorded as documentation bug ID #PBA-53217).

Before copying the content of the ssm.conf.d folder from the source server to the destination one ( http://download.pa.parallels.com/pba/5.4/doc/60643.htm ), it is recommended that you review all the modified container configuration files (those without the dot sign at the beginning of the name). They should only contain the modified parameters (e.g. the log level, the default language, etc). If a www.conf file is present in the ssm.conf.d folder, make sure it does not have a line

bindir = $(st_prefix)/bin

If there is such a line, remove it. If you do not, configure.pl may fail/www will fail to start.

If you are using watchdog, then as a post-upgrade step it is required to check/change its configuration according to article #113595. To function correctly, WWW_URL must be set either to a localhost (https://127.0.0.1) or to a correct URL of the PBA control panel (without the port specified).

Before running configure.pl for the second time (during the post-migration procedure), it is necessary to verify the System DSN setting for DSN names "pba" (these should correspond to "DB_NAME" in the global.conf file) and "pba_verify" in:

Administrative Tools -> Data Sources (ODBC) -> System DSN

This wizard has several screens. On each of them, some DSN connection parameters are specified.

On the first screen, in the section "Which SQL Server do you want to connect to?" it should be specified IP address listed as "DB_HOST" in the "global.conf".

On the second screen, the "Login ID and Password" sections should contain data from "DB_USER" and "DB_PASSWD" respectively in the "global.conf".

On the third screen, in the section "Change the default database to", the database name from "DB_NAME" in the "global.conf" should be specified.

For "pba_verify" DSN, the section "Change the default database to" should have "pba_verify" selected.

It is important to make sure that both databases specified in the DSN name wizard exist on the MSSQL server before running the configure.pl script.

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