Upgrades

Different upgrade methods are available for OneSpan Authentication Server:

  • Standard upgrades
  • Rolling upgrades

When performing an upgrade, you need to understand the difference between the standard upgrading procedure and a rolling upgrade. During a standard upgrading procedure, the user must expect a short period of server downtime, whereas the service will not be taken offline during a rolling upgrade.

Standard upgrades

During a standard upgrade, the server is shut down. The binaries are updated and OneSpan Authentication Server Configuration Wizard is run to perform the initial configuration. When the configuration has completed, the server is restarted.

To this point, no data has been migrated yet. Data can now be migrated using two complementary mechanisms:

On-the-fly data migration

Data is migrated on-the-fly whenever OneSpan Authentication Server receives requests (e.g. authentication requests) and accesses server data. Only data records that are required to process the request are migrated.

Task-based data migration

To systematically migrate all server data from the old installation, you need to start or schedule a data migration task via the Web Administration Service. This task runs in the background and migrates all database records one-by-one to the new schema, except for server data that has already been migrated on-the-fly.

For more information about creating data migration tasks, refer to the OneSpan Authentication Server Installation Guide for Linux or the OneSpan Authentication Server Installation Guide for Windows (as applicable), Section "Post-upgrade considerations and tasks".

When upgrading multiple OneSpan Authentication Server instances that are configured to replicate data changes between them, the data migration task needs to run after all server instances have been upgraded, and when replication between all instances is enabled again!

Rolling upgrades

This scenario involves upgrading multiple OneSpan Authentication Server instances while keeping the authentication service alive. Environments that require a rolling upgrade typically support high-availability services, where the authentication service absolutely cannot be taken offline.

For more information about rolling upgrades, refer to the OneSpan Authentication Server Administrator Guide.