Overview of Environment Refresh

Deployment Management enables controlled migration of software and application changes to various instances. Deployment Management maintains an audit trail of activity, providing visibility into the changes for each environment. There are, however, situations when you need to refresh an environment, essentially replacing that environment with a physical copy of another environment.

Figure 7-7. Example software migration

If a standard software migration is from a Development environment to a Test environment to a Production environment, you may want to periodically copy the Production environment into both the Development and Test environments. This activity would involve copying all objects at the file system and database level from Production into the Development and Test areas, producing mirror images of the Production environment. This refresh function synchronizes the environments, and moves additional production data into development and testing environments.

After using the refresh function, Deployment Management has the ability to update its audit history and its in-process packages. This update is performed using Deployment Management's Environment Refresh Workbench functionality.

The environment refresh function in Deployment Management does not perform the actual physical refresh of one environment with another. It updates the Deployment Management data to be consistent with the refreshed physical occurrence.

Deployment Management's Environment Refresh performs the following functions:

• Identifies open package lines that have migrated through the environment and are now inaccurate due to the software changes. In the example described in Figure 7-7. Example software migration, the refreshed environments would be Development and Test, while the source environment would be Production. After the physical refresh, these package lines will be inaccurate due to the software changes no longer being present in the refreshed environment.

• Updates the list of affected package lines as necessary, including adding or deleting lines from the list.

• Updates the Deployment Management internal object inventory tables to reflect the physical refresh. This copies the audit history from the source environment to the audit history of the refreshed environment. Because they are now physical matches of each other, their audit history should be the same.

• Updates the open package lines in the refresh list and resets them so they are eligible for migration into the refreshed environment again.