Overview of Entity Migration

Consider a scenario in which you want to migrate configuration entities between your "QA" and "Production" instances of PPM. You can automate and track the migration using either the source instance (QA) or the destination instance (Production). In the example that follows, you are using the destination instance to control the migration.

You migrate PPM entities in the same way that you perform any other deployment management process. To prepare for the entity migration you do the following:

  • Set up the environment definitions for your "QA" and "Production" instances.

  • Configure a workflow that directs the migration process (necessary approvals, and an automated execution step that specifies your "QA" and "Production" environments as source and destination, respectively).

After you perform these tasks, you can use Deployment Management packages to specify the entities to migrate. Create a package, specify your migration workflow, and add package lines using the entity migratory object types for each PPM configuration entity that you want to migrate.

When the automated migration execution workflow step is run, the following events occur (remember that, in this example, you are running the migration in the destination, or Production, environment):

  1. The Production server connects to the QA server using SSH, and then submits a request for the specified configuration data.

  2. The QA server extracts the requested configuration data from its database and generates an XML representation of the data.

  3. The QA server writes the extracted XML data into a set of temporary XML files, and packages that set of files together in a Zip file.

  4. The Production server copies the Zip file that contains the bundled XML data from QA to Production.

    Note: If you want to perform version control on changes to PPM configuration entities as they are migrated, you can version the compressed file that is extracted from the source instance.

    We recommend that you not extract this file manually, except for debugging purposes.

  5. The Production server unpacks the migrated compressed file into temporary storage, and reads the associated XML files.

  6. The Production server imports the configuration data to its database, and then generates an execution log.