HCL Workload Automation, Version 9.4

Agent upgrade with minimal scheduling disruption

Upgrade your agents with little or no impact on your job scheduling.

Planning the maintenance of your agents no longer means negotiating rare idle time windows. You want to ensure scheduling continuity while minimizing upgrade efforts. If an upgrade is not carefully planned, you risk prolonged scheduling downtime and unmet service level agreements.

With HCL Workload Automation agent upgrade with minimal scheduling disruption, both fault-tolerant agent and dynamic agent instances can be upgraded with minimal impact to scheduling activities. The agents are stopped for the shortest possible time, and although any jobs already running when the upgrade process begins continue to run as planned, no new jobs begin execution during this brief period. Once the upgrade is complete, the agent is restarted and quickly reconnects with its jobs. Any jobs that were actively running before the upgrade that have not yet completed, continue to run according to schedule, and any that have since finished running, report a successful status as usual.

The same behavior is applied to active agent command-line interfaces and processes such as conman or composer. After the agent upgrade, all processes and command-line interfaces resume and continue to run regularly.

The entire upgrade process is reliable and fail-safe with an automatic backup and restore feature in case of failure, and it all takes just a few minutes to complete.

Important: The agent upgrade with minimal scheduling disruption is supported for upgrading only version 9.x fault-tolerant and dynamic agent instances.

For information about upgrading agents with minimal disruption see Upgrading agents and domain managers

See the video Agent upgrade with minimal scheduling disruption on the Workload Automation YouTube channel.