Stability - 10.15 is a brand new release. As much as the products are tested before they’re released, there are unique, peculiar and enterprise-scale scenarios in real-life simply due to permutations and combinations of how the products are used.
Versions take some time to “stabilize” when issues are discovered, reported, reproduced and resolved, but new fixes are constantly made available.
Your decision on the target version needs to be driven by your business’ desire for using innovative and market-differentiating features, but also your risk appetite for issues. Note that there are more factors to be considered as well.
Approach - The approach is based on your business’ preference, again. Typically, I don’t recommend an over-install, so you can consider a side-by-side same host (same machine, different installation path) or side-by-side cross host (new machine).
They both have their prerequisites, advantages and disadvantages, so if you’re new to this, I’d recommend that you do a PoC and see what is best suited for your business and landscape.
Here are some examples of what I mean -
Side-by-side Same Host
- Prerequisite - OS version must be supported by both the source and target wM versions
- Advantage - No horizontal increase in infra footprint, only vertical, so operations is not overloaded and wM DNS remains the same
- Disadvantage - Ports for the old and new instances cannot be the same since they share the same machine, so your peripheral applications are impacted
Side-by-side Cross-Host
- Prerequisite - OS and Database versions must be supported by the target wM version
- Advantage - Retain same ports, only DNS changes but impact can be eliminated if you are using a load-balancer
- Disadvantage - Additional infra cost and operations overhead since you are atleast doubling up your machines
Again, note that these are just examples off the top of my mind - there is so much more detail to assess.
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