Issue

I would like to migrate from Jenkins to Cloudbees CI on traditional platforms.

Environment

• CloudBees CI (CloudBees Core)
• CloudBees CI (CloudBees Core) on traditional platforms - Client Master
• CloudBees Jenkins Platform - Client Master
• Jenkins LTS

Resolution

Backup strategy

Ensuring you have regular backups of your JENKINS_HOME. The backups should be stored on separate hardware from your Jenkins instance, at a minimum, even better would be an offsite location such as cloud storage.

We also want to take another backup immediately before you start the migration.

Testing if these backups are valid is also critical as if the backup is not valid and we encounter a severe issue during the migration, the way to recover from the failure is to restore from the backup you took immediately prior to the migration. A great way to test the validity of these backups is with a Test environment.

Steps

• We recommend to let all running builds complete before you begin to migrate.
• Stop the service.
• Take a backup of JENKINS_HOME.
• Install Cloudbees CI (RPM, deb, war file, …). This new service must point to the same JENKINS_HOME folder.
• Start the new service.
• Share the instance ID with the CloudBees Customer Success team (csm-help@cloudbees.com) for a license.
• Enter the license and save

After this, go to Manage Jenkins -> Beekeeper Upgrade Assistant -> CAP Configuration and ensure Enroll this instance in the CloudBees Assurance Program is checked. Then go to Manage Jenkins -> Manage Plugins and under the Updates tab, upgrade all plugins, and restart the instance.

To finish with, follow these articles to configure your instance with our recommendations:

Prepare Jenkins for Support
CloudBees Jenkins JVM troubleshooting