Installation Overview

If all prerequisites are installed, backups are complete, Windows user accounts have been created and the initial Octopus configuration has been completed, the Forsta Plus upgrade / installation should be ready to commence. Once started, Octopus Deploy will look for existing installations, and if any are found, will proceed to upgrade the existing version. One or more of the steps described in the following sections might be required for the update to continue.

Install / Upgrade Sequence

Octopus deployment governs the installation sequence of Horizons components, beginning with the downloading of packages for the release, checking prerequisites are installed, updating SQL schemas (if required) and then proceeding to install specific packages related to the role of the site and each server.

Note: Changes to any database schemas are performed by the server assigned with the ‘SiteBootstrapper’ role in Octopus.

You can see the overview of the installation process either by selecting ‘Process’ in the release you intend to install or, if already installed, the previous task list of the installation.

Note: The first installation / upgrade of an environment using the Octopus deployment method must be performed with the supervision of the Forsta Operations team. The following sections provide an overview of how the installation / upgrade is preformed and how you can deploy newer builds to your environment.

Forsta Plus Deployment

Deployment Process

Octopus deployment is the methodology you will use to install Forsta Plus onto the various machines in each environment. Refer to the Octopus section for an overview of the technology and process.

Deployment is the most common activity you will perform from the Octopus console.

Note: Deployment to environments must run in a specific order (as setup by your Forsta technician). For example if you have Staging and Production environments, then your Octopus configuration will ensure that before a Forsta Plus version is deployed to your production environment it must first be deployed to your staging environment. This ordering of environments can be changed or removed, but this is an advanced topic.

Deploy Forsta Plus to the Staging Environment

Figure 1 - Deploying to the Staging environment

The aim here is to take a version of Forsta Plus that is available to the Octopus server, and then install it onto the Staging then Production Environments.

As stated in the previous section, the order of deployment to environments is strictly controlled by Octopus. New versions of Forsta Plus must be deployed on the Staging environment before they can be deployed to production.

Deploy to All Servers in an Environment

1. From the Octopus web interface - go to the top of the screen and click Dashboard.
Note: This is the default view when first logging into Octopus.



Figure 2 - The Dashboard screen (this may differ from site to site)

2. Select Forsta Plus.
3. Select Deploy on the version you wish to install.



Figure 3 - Click Deploy

The release deployment process window opens.

4. Verify you are deploying to the intended environment, scroll to the bottom and select Deploy Release.

Figure 4 - Deploying a release to the Production environment

This will begin preloading Forstanuget packages from the designated Forsta repository.

Preload Step

Potential low bandwidth and latency issues between your site’s Octopus server and Forsta’s Artifactory repositories may result in very long deployment times. The Forsta Plusrelease is approximately ~2GB, so downloading and then installing can impact installation times.

The Preload step (step 1) is a break-point in the Octopus rollout script; it stops the processing of the Octopus installation once the Forsta Plus packages have been downloaded. It then requires a manual confirmation to proceed. Once the pre-load step has completed, any subsequent installations of the release will make use of the locally cached files, rather than downloading the components again. Subsequent deployments of the same release to the same servers can be done by skipping this step.

After you have selected Deploy, your installation will stop at this point (after the Acquire Packages step).

Figure 5 - Preload complete

Click Show details to view the notification of ‘Preload Completed’

To continue the installation click Assign to me. The following notification will appear:

Figure 6 - Preload completed

Click Proceed to continue with the installation.

Installation progress can be followed from here. The Task Summary tab displays the deployment steps. More detailed information can be obtained from the ‘Task Log’ tab.