What should we consider when upgrading from SDL Tridion 2011 to 2013 and putting our non-production environments on the cloud?

Question

Currently we have Tridion 2011 SP1, we are working on an RFP to upgrade to Tridion 2013 an put a portion of it in a cloud environment. As per a brief overview given by client in the RFP, we are planning to put DEV, ST (System testing) and UAT in a cloud environment and Production will be kept on internal infrastructure.

Can anyone guide us on which points we should consider for the upgrade as well for our cloud implementation? This is first time we are doing this on the cloud.

The technology we use for content delivery is Java.

Answer 1

Upgrade should be fairly painless. 2011sp1 and 2013 are the same architecture and so not too many surprises there. If you run VBScript tempalates, you'll need the legacy pack since 2013 no longer requires COM+ for Templates or APIs.

You'll need to re-compile any C# TBBs, Core Service, Event System, or other custom applications that rely on Tridion assemblies. There are no breaking or removed APIs, so this is a low risk operation.

For the cloud, you will need to use 1 instance of Win 2012 Server for the CMS and another instance for the DB. I have had fairly good performance with the Amazon Large instance and this would probably be OK for Dev/Test. Medium instances are a bit too slow.

I have also had fairly good performance with a medium Azure instance. Seems to perform a little better than Amazon, no idea why.

Finally, follow a good security plan for accessing the cloud servers. Typical meausres include whitelisting certain IP ranges or addresses. But, this applies to all cloud systems, not only Tridion. Good luck and make sure to follow the upgrade guide in the Tridion Live Documentation.

Answer 2

Few points need to remember while setting up Tridion on a different machine, which are below

1. You need a different licence file for your new CD server, which you need to put on upload folder.
2. Make sure your all servers allow access by doing changes in your firewall settings.
3. You need to enable a few ports through which you are able to access data.
4. Can port every thing on new location except the user names if and then again need to reassign those users int othe user groups.
5. Also copy all yours dlls like event system and custom function into the new server/location's config file.
6. If you were usinf site edit then need to updated new tags for experience manager(updated version of site edit).

Answer 3

The upgrade from Tridion 2011 SP1 to 2013 (SP1 presumably) is fully supported by SDL, well documented and should be quite straightforward.

With regards to the upgrade, I would recommend that you do a full audit of the modules and add-on products that you already have, and the APIs that you are currently using, to establish what aspects will need attention during the upgrade.

This will also give you opportunity to identify exactly which sections and steps within the upgrade documentation apply. It is important to do this in advance, as there are a lot of parts where it says, for example: "Only if you are upgrading from SDL Tridion XXX then perform the steps below." and it is very easy to miss something.

With regards to hosting on the cloud, make sure that your Database and Publisher Servers have plenty of resources. You may also want to think about whether UAT has to be 'like for like' with Production.