[Deploying Sakai] patching and downtime

[Will Humphries]

Hi everyone,

What approaches do you take to roll out updates/patches to Sakai or its 
dependencies (appserver OS, apache, db server/OS, etc.)? Do you take a 
downtime for these events? If not, what strategies do you employ to 
avoid downtime, and how well have they worked for you?

We're taking a downtime for all of these activities at Tufts. On the 
appserver side, we've talked about rolling Tomcat restarts when making 
the kind of changes that don't need to be on every appserver at once to 
function.

On the db side, we run Oracle with Data Guard, but some operations (site 
creation, maybe others) can be interrupted by the temporary loss of db 
connectivity that occurs when switching from primary to secondary db, so 
we don't use that feature to avoid stopping Tomcat.

Thanks,
Will