Just a quick note to point out that new Meridian releases are now available: 2015.1.5 and 2016.1.5

For those who aren’t aware, Meridian is a subscription-based version of OpenNMS built to complement Horizon, the cutting edge release. You can think of it as Meridian is our Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Horizon’s Fedora. There is one major Meridian release per year and each major release is supported for three years.

Before the Meridian/Horizon split it was taking us 18 months or so to do a new major release of OpenNMS. Now we do three to four Horizon major releases a year.

About half of our revenue comes from support contracts and so we had to be extra careful when doing a release, and even with that many of our customers were reluctant to upgrade because the process could be involved. This was bad for two main reasons: often they wouldn’t get bug fixes which meant an increase in support tickets, and more importantly they might miss security updates.

Updates to Meridian, within a major release, are dead simple. This is the process I used yesterday to upgrade our production instance of OpenNMS.

First, I made a backup of the /opt/opennms/etc and /opt/opennms/jetty-webapps/opennms directories. The first is out of habit since configuration files shouldn’t change between point releases, but the second is to preserve any customizations made to the webUI. I modify the main OpenNMS page to include a “weather widget” and that customization gets removed on upgrades. Most users won’t have an issue but just in case I like having a backup.

Next, I stop OpenNMS and run yum install opennms which will download and install the new release. The final step is to run /opt/opennms/bin/install -dis to insure the database is up to date.

And that’s it. In my case, I copy the index.jsp from my backup to restore the weather information, but otherwise you just restart OpenNMS. The process takes minutes and is basically as fast as your Internet connection.

If you have a Meridian subscription, be sure to upgrade as soon as you are able, and if you don’t, what are you waiting for? (grin)