BMC Remedy rapid release

BMC has kind of started a rapid release schedule for AR System/Atrium/ITSM/SmartIT. That means that some parts will get new releases every 3 months and some parts every 6 month. This is great, to see fixes and quality improvements. But I can not really see anybody running a full ITSM/SmartIT stack to be able to upgrade at this speed.

Anyway, as of 4th of September 2018 18.08 is out. And the parts of 18.05 that was not generally available was made available. 18.05 contains some big changes which need some thought before you move forward.

BMC is trying to move all parts into this new version schema. So all products in AR System/Atrium/ITSM/SmartIT should have the same version number. The version number is YY.MM of the release. But so far AR System/Atrium/ITSM is called with the old version numbers, which in 18.05 is 9.1.05. So still not fully in sync. But the documentation is using the new version numbers. 18.05 already have a bunch of patches.

From 9.1.05 the old RPC based ARAPI used from C is officially out of support and not updated. So the changes in AR System that is in 9.1.05 is only supported in the Java version of ARAPI. One of those changes is menu type to get license info that is needed in the new license management.

Other new things is a console to more easy access configuration and status of a server group. And more or less even a standalone server is treated as a server group. The biggest problem at the moment with the server group config is that some of the config is in raw database tables that you can only access with database tools if you need to fix something. And you will need to fix something for sure.

The file deployment is now the way to patch the system. And in 9.1.05 there are new enhancement to work better for CMDB and ITSM. One of the most important thing about file deployment is that you have to have the file deployment service running on all servers. And you have to make sure the AR System Monitor form contains all the servers with correct info, and only the correct servers. Of curse to make this work you have to have firewalls open so the server doing the deploy can access all the servers.

SmartIT/MyIT/Digital workplace is now more separate, and your URLs will change. But still on same server. MongoDB is gone. And there is probably more things that I am missing. But this is my first take on this.