Overview of Atlassian Data Center instance consolidation

When migrating your application to Data Center, you may choose to consolidate multiple application instances into a single Data Center deployment. Separate application instances may exist due to company acquisitions, or because individual teams within your company set up their own Atlassian applications. Consolidating instances onto a single Data Center deployment can help streamline management and operation of your Atlassian applications. This document provides a high-level overview of the consolidation process.

Process

The Data Center upgrade guide outlines the overall process of migrating your Server application to Data Center. You will need to build a team, review current application status and settings, test the installation, and communicate updates. Additionally, consolidation requires that you standardize your application setup and merge instances by migrating application data from each source instance to a single destination instance. You should expect these tasks to increase your migration timeframe.

Based on how you decide to standardize and merge your instances, the consolidation process may affect the user experience, accessibility, and data for your users. It's important that you communicate all expected differences throughout the process, and provide your end users with any documentation and education they may need regarding these changes.

Standardize application setup

When reviewing all your current Server application instances, you'll need to review their setup, such as custom fields, workflows, apps, or customizations. Stakeholders will need to review these against the needs of all your users, and decide which of these to include in the consolidated Data Center application. For example, one of the application instances may have a workflow used by a handful of people to track blog posts, and you may decide that it isn't necessary to implement across the entire organization. For any apps moved to the Data Center application, it's important to upgrade their licenses to match the license tier of Data Center that you are using. Additionally, it's important to review, modify, and communicate any changes in user permissions and privileges. For example, administrators of the individual application instances may not remain as administrators of the Data Center application.

Merge instances

After determining the application setup for the consolidated Data Center application, you will need to merge the different instances into a single destination instance, which is the first node of the Data Center cluster. Merging instances migrates all desired projects, spaces, etc., from a source instance of the application to a destination instance without destroying the configuration and data of the destination instance. Before starting the process, build a timeline for merging each instance one at a time, and communicate that schedule to your users, including any possible downtime your users may experience. The following steps provide a high-level guide for merging each instance:

1. Perform a backup of the destination instance.
2. Upgrade the source instance to the application version installed on the destination instance.
3. Ensure that the application settings (i.e. language, locale) are the same across the source and destination instances.
4. Ensure that any apps from the source instance, which you intend to keep using on Data Center, are installed on the destination instance with the same version.
5. Review and resolve users across the application instances.
   • Remove stale users, as every active user migrated adds to your overall license count.
   • Create unique usernames on the destination instance for any people who have conflicting usernames (two different people with the same username) on existing instances.
6. Review and resolve the names of globally available configuration objects (i.e. projects, spaces, workflows, etc.) across the source and destination instances.
   • For any objects with the same name, check if the names mean the same thing in both instances.
   • If they mean different things, rename the object on one of the instances.
7. Export data from the source instance. The following links are guides for exporting data for each application:
   • Backing up Jira data

   • Export a Confluence space

   • Export data using the Bitbucket Data Center Migration tool

8. Import data into a development/staging environment that replicates the production environment of the destination instance. The following links are guides for importing data for each application:
   
   • Restoring a Jira project from backup
   • Restoring a Confluence space
   • Import data using the Bitbucket Data Center Migration tool
9. Perform user acceptance testing, and verify that the migration worked correctly.

After consolidating all instances, follow the rest of the process as outlined in the Data Center migration plan.

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