Administration Support for Older Hosts and Nodes

TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administration server supports hosts and nodes of versions prior to ActiveMatrix Service Grid 3.4.0.

ActiveMatrix Service Grid may support many solutions in a production environment. Upgrading to a newer version of the ActiveMatrix product may bring with it unique challenges. For that reason, some enterprises may be reluctant to upgrade their entire set of applications to the new version at once. Some businesses may choose to upgrade gradually, some may plan it in phases, and some may not upgrade their applications at all.

TIBCO ActiveMatrix Administrator can manage ActiveMatrix Hosts, Nodes, and Applications running versions prior to ActiveMatrix Service Grid 3.4.0. With this, you can install the latest ActiveMatrix version and continue to use and manage the existing ActiveMatrix environments.

In an enterprise, the hosts or nodes could have a version that is different from the ActiveMatrix Administrator that manages them. For example, in 3.4.0, ActiveMatrix Administrator can be upgraded to 3.4.0 while the host it manages could be running on an older version (3.3.0 or 3.2.0) and they can still coexist.
Note: Some Administration-related features (for example: updating a host's JVM parameters, downloading log files, and so on) will not work on these hosts and nodes which are "not upgraded" .

When a runtime host is upgraded to 3.4.0, all the nodes managed by that host are also upgraded to 3.4.0. As a result, the host and the nodes it manages are in sync and run the same version of ActiveMatrix.

Managing older versions of hosts and nodes

Exceptions to Version Coexistence

As a rule, a Deployment Artifact Archive (DAA) can only be used with nodes whose version is greater than or equal to the Studio version used to create the DAA. For example, a DAA created by ActiveMatrix 3.3.0 requires nodes running ActiveMatrix 3.3.x or higher (for example, 3.4.0).

To find out the node version, you can use the tibcohost.exe describeNodes command or use the ActiveMatrix Administrator UI Nodes tab.

For more information on version coexistence scenarios, refer to the 'Upgrade' topic of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid Installation and Configuration Guide

Note: If your Application (DAA) deploys and runs fine in an earlier version of TIBCO ActiveMatrix 3.4.0 but does not work properly in TIBCO ActiveMatrix 3.4.0 environment, then check the logs to see if it is because of the Application's dependency on some Third Party Component Library (TPCL) jars whose TIBCO ActiveMatrix 3.4.0 version drops export of some packages. If yes, then manually add those imports in your projects, rebuild and regenerate DAA, and deploy again.