Upgrading the IBM MQ Appliance firmware from version 9.2 to version 9.3

You can upgrade the firmware of an IBM® MQ Appliance from version 9.2 (running version 9.2 queue managers) directly to version 9.3 (running version 9.3 queue managers).

Note: You can only upgrade an M2002 appliance, and it must be running IBM MQ 9.2.0 LTS or 9.2.5 CD firmware that includes APAR IT41539.
Important: Upgrading your M2002 appliance is a one-way operation. After you have upgraded to 9.3, you can no longer revert to 9.2. The appliance will restart several times during the upgrade.
There are a number of options in planning your upgrade, and the best approach depends on your current environment, disaster recovery strategy, and planned continuity of service during the upgrade window.

If you currently have a disaster recovery (DR) configuration, you can keep queue managers active throughout the upgrade process. You do this by running a queue manager on one appliance in the DR pair until the upgrade is complete, then swapping appliances and repeating the upgrade. Note that, once a queue manager has been started on an upgraded appliance, this queue manager will not be able to fail back to an appliance running the earlier (version 9.2) firmware. For this reason, you should upgrade DR recovery appliances before live appliances.

The procedure to upgrade a stand-alone appliance using the described strategy contains several major steps:
  1. Stop all your queue managers.
  2. Create the location and allocate storage for your backup archive files.
  3. Back up all of your queue managers to archive files.
  4. Upgrade your appliance to the new firmware level.
  5. Restart your queue managers.
You can complete these steps by using the appliance command line interface. You can also complete most of the steps by using the IBM MQ Console.