ColdFusion 11 to ColdFusion 2021 upgrade

[Ron Hoit]

Is there an upgrade path from ColdFusion 11 to ColdFusion 2021 using an upgrade?

[Priyank Shrivastava.]

Hi @Ron Hoit 

In terms of Application - YES

In terms of Purchase  - NO. You can only upgrade from CF2018 to CF2021. 

You can move your application to CF2021 and test it. If you encounter minor issues, you can fix it. 

[Ron Hoit]

So purchase the full version of CF 2021, and then upgrade from CF 11 to CF 2021?  Or do I need to do a clean install of CF 2021, and then move my setting and sites?

[Ron Hoit]

I was going to use this:

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf2021/cf2021-migration-guide.pdf

[IHiJump]

Getting a 404 on this migration guide link. Does anyone have a copy?

[Charlie Arehart]

First, Adobe is aware of the problem and working on it (I was told a couple of days ago, when I reported it).

Second, fortunately there is a link for it at the good ol' "internet archive" wayback machine.

And I have a blog post with more on that wonderful resource and how easily it can be used, including how you could have found it by just prepending the url with web.archive.org:

web.archive.org/https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf2021/cf2021-migration-guide.pdf

That will sometimes show that there is no archived version of the page, but often there is one, as in this case. Enjoy.

[IHiJump]

Thanks Charlie. I watched a few of your videos in preparation for our upgrade. Since we're on VMs, I was ultimately able to stand up another VM and install there. Then it was a matter of copying over code and tweaking some settings. The most work went into recreating the scheduled tasks.  All in all, it was a very smooth migration!

[Charlie Arehart]

Great to hear the migration went well. Thanks for the update, and the kind regards. 

[dmerrill]

Link is still broken, a month later (:-(

[Priyank Shrivastava.]

Here, I am sharing the link for the Migration guide until it is fixed.

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/us/en/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf2018/cf2018-migration-guide.pd...

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/us/en/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf2018/CF2021-migration-guide.pd... 

[Charlie Arehart]

Thanks for that workaround, Priyank. 

[Priyank Shrivastava.]

If you are planning to install in a new server, then you can install and later activate it. In case you are installing it in a same server where you have CF11 running, that is also possible however, you need to make sure that you will not create the connector with CF2021 without removing the CF11 connector. It will create an duplicate entries in IIS(Case is for Windows machine) and then you have to manually remove it. 

You can install the trial version first and test your application. Further, you can purchase the license. You mentioned the migration guide which has all the instructions on how to migrate setting from CF11 to CF2021. 

[BKBK]

 Or do I need to do a clean install of CF 2021, and then move my setting and sites?

By @Ron Hoit

That's the route I would suggest. Buy the CF2021 licence, install CF2021 and move your sites and settings, avoiding any interaction whatsoever with CF 11.

I say this because CF 11 is much older. As such, it will likely introduce legacy incompatibilities - in other words, headaches - into the mix.

[Ron Hoit]

Yes, I believe that's the way I'm going to go.  I've got 2 servers that are less than 2 years old.  The current webservers are like 7 years old.  And the newer servers have betters specs in the CPU / memory and hard drive areas.  I'll reload both servers with fresh Windows server software and load one up as my dev server and the other as my production server.  Then copy over all websites / IIS and CF admin settings.  Then test the crap out of the websites to see what breaks with the newer CF 2021 software.

[BKBK]

... the newer servers have betters specs in the CPU / memory and hard drive areas.  I'll reload both servers with fresh Windows server software and load one up as my dev server and the other as my production server.  Then copy over all websites / IIS and CF admin settings.  Then test the crap out of the websites to see what breaks with the newer CF 2021 software.

By @Ron Hoit

Way to go!

[Ron Hoit]

Okay, now I have ColdFusion 2021 Enterprise installed on both my Production and Development servers.  With the old servers running ColdFusion 11 Enterprise, is it okay to export the server setting from 11 to 2021?  I have read alittle about the CAR function, but haven't found any instructions yet.  I also read something about a wizard for doing these things.  I have not moved any websites or anything yet.  The only thing that we've done so far is load the new ColdFusion 2021 Enterprise.  Does anyone have any insight for me?

[Dave Watts]

It ... should be ok ... mostly. I'd make sure the new servers work first before you do this. The instructions for using the CAR format are here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/configuring-administering/deploying-coldfusion-applications.html#...

I haven't read through that, but I do have one or two warnings. First, be very, very careful to avoid selecting Java settings when you create the CAR file, because those will not match the settings for CF 2021. Second, I would recommend that you create CAR files for each individual application if you can, so that you look carefully at the settings for each. There are things you might not want to include, like where CFFORM scripts are located, global mappings, and so on.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

[Ron Hoit]

Yes, the JAVA on the CF11 server had a path of C:\Program Files\JAVA\jre1.8.0_241

The default path for JAVA on the CF2012 server was C:\ColdFusion2021\JRE

I changed it to C:\Program Files\JAVA\jre1.8.0_301 after installing the newest java download. 

This server is only being used as a CF server, and has 32 GB memory, would it be beneficial to increase the JVM Heap Size to like 4096?

And I would assume that the JVM Arguments listing setting the default would be good?

[Dave Watts]

I'm not sure that CF 2021 supports any version of Java prior to 11. You can increase the JVM memory size settings (heap, generations etc) to something significantly greater than 4096.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

[Ron Hoit]

So should I have left the JAVA path as the default and uninstall the JAV that I loaded?

[Dave Watts]

I would either use the version of Java that CF 2021 came with, or install the latest Java 11 somewhere else and switch to that directory. You don't need to uninstall anything unless you're really tight on disk space. You can have as many versions of Java as you want. But CF can only use one of them of course.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

[Ron Hoit]

Okay, I'll just unistall what I loaded and change the JAVA path back to the default.  Hopefully our websites will still work properly.  And I will be making a CAR file for each section just in case.  I'm actually very new to the setup of ColdFusion.  Our CF 11 server was setup by someone else, and sadly, they are lno onger with us.  The good thing is that the servers still work, and I have some time to setup and test this for awhile before going live...

[Ron Hoit]

Yikes, after unistalling JAVA the CF Admin will not open.  I maybe should have changed the java path before uninstalling.  Looks like I'm starting over.

[Ron Hoit]

Okay, so now that I've started over:

Uninstalled CF 2021 from new server

Re-installed CF 2021 on the new server

Created CAR file from CF 11 installation on old CF Production server

Didn't include anything from the Java and JVM

Imported CAR file using Packaging and Deployment

Copied over the Inetpub folder

Re-created websites in IIS (only did 3 for testing)

Ran ColdFusion Web Server Configuration Tool to create handler mappings for:

     cfcHandler

     cfmHandler

     cfmIHandler

     cfrHandler

     cfsHandler

Added the following roles under "WebServer" in server manager features wizard:

     .NET Extensibility 3.5

     ASP.NET 3.5

     CGI

     ISAPI Extensions

     ISAPI Filters

Added "Index.cfm" entry under the Default Document section in IIS

Verified all database paths (only did 3 for testing)

Current getting the following when I test the first website:

[Priyank Shrivastava.]

Thats a DB coonection issue. Please check db connection in CF Admin. If they verify OK, your app will work.