Relativity upgrade

Use the following workflows to upgrade your current Relativity installation to Relativity 2023.

To begin your upgrade process, address custom solutions and scripts before downloading the Relativity installer. Once you complete the workflow specific to your upgrade path, we recommend completing the post-installation verification tests post-upgrade to confirm that your environment has been upgraded properly.

We recommend preparing for your upgrade process by using the Pre-Upgrade Checklist. You can use this document to discuss an upgrade strategy for your current installation of Relativity with the Customer Support team.

If you are installing Relativity for the first time, contact the Customer Support team for additional information. You may also want to review the information on the Relativity installation page.

Addressing custom scripts that trigger imaging jobs

If you plan on upgrading Relativity and you use custom scripts that programmatically trigger imaging jobs in your current Relativity environment, those scripts will no longer work after you upgrade.

This is because the components that those custom scripts rely upon no longer exist due to the changes made to the imaging framework, which are listed below. The imaging operations performed by these custom scripts are not accounted for in the KCD Snapshot Solution script.

  • The Imaging Set Manager and Worker agents have been deprecated.
  • The Imaging Set Queue table has been deprecated.
  • The Imaging API now submits an imaging job directly to Invariant, worker manager server.

Before you upgrade, contact Customer Support for instructions on how to adjust your custom scripts.

Required pre-upgrade steps for all Relativity versions

Before you begin your upgrade, you must complete the following pre-upgrade steps.

Complete the following steps and verify you have the necessary information required for all upgrades of Relativity. Depending on your upgrade path, you may have additional configuration or other tasks to perform specific to the version of Relativity you're installing.

Make sure you have the appropriate system admin permissions in Relativity before beginning the upgrade. For more information, see Managing security.

Confirm that jobs are not running in any of the queues. If the agents are running, they may attempt to run a job against a database that does not have an upgraded schema and cause serious errors in your Relativity environment.

Obtain credentials for service and database accounts

To upgrade Relativity, you need credentials for the following accounts:

  • Relativity Service account (Windows Workgroup/Domain account)—run the Relativity upgrade logged in as the Relativity Service account. This account must have local Administrator permissions on the target server, and SQL sysadmin role privileges on the SQL Server.
  • EDDSDBO account (SQL account)

Note: Do not begin the upgrade process until you obtain the credentials for these accounts. They are required when you run the installer.

Review system and other requirements

Confirm that your environment is configured with the prerequisites before you begin upgrading Relativity. See the following documents for more information:

Apply a trusted certificate for the Analytics server

As of Relativity 2023, a trusted certificate is required for all HTTPS traffic, including the internal traffic for the Analytics server. We recommend placing the certificate and testing it prior to the day of the upgrade to Relativity 2023 or above.

See Pre-upgrade: Update the default SSL/TLS certificate for CAAT® for more information.

Back up your Relativity environment

Back up your SQL databases and your Relativity IIS websites before you begin the upgrade process. You should also back up both the structured analytics sets and analytics indexes before your upgrade to ensure that there is no data loss. This may take a while so it's recommended to run analytics backups either during the week of or the week prior to your upgrade. Usually this data does not change daily, so this helps to mitigate any data loss. For more information, see Moving Analytics indexes.

Reboot machines with Windows updates

After installing Windows updates, reboot your machines before attempting to install Relativity. Complete this step to ensure that all Relativity components are properly installed. Incomplete Windows updates lock system files, which may cause silent failures and prevent the proper installation of Relativity components.

Download the Relativity installer

To receive the correct Relativity installer package for your upgrade workflow contact the Customer Support team.

8.1, 8.2, 9.x, or 10.x to 2023 upgrade workflow

Use the following workflow when upgrading from Relativity 8.1, 8.2, 9.x, or 10.x to Relativity 2023.

Note: Never upgrade your Relativity version while there are jobs of any type currently in progress in your environment. Doing this leads to inaccurate results when you attempt to finish those jobs after your upgrade is complete. This is especially important for imaging and processing jobs.

To upgrade your environment from 8.1, 8.2, 9.x, or 10.x to 2023, use the following diagram as a guide. Click on a step to navigate to a topic.

    Notes:
  • Before you upgrade, verify that you meet all requirements outlined in Pre-installation.
  • Once you've completed upgrading core servers—Secret Store, Primary SQL, Worker Manager—all remaining servers can be upgraded in any order or in parallel.
  1. Install the Secret Store and configure all machines in your environment to access it. This step should be completed before the Relativity upgrade and can be done online without impacting user review. For more information, see Secret Store.
  2. Stop all agent services.
  3. Stop the IIS.
  4. Run the Relativity installer on your Primary SQL Server to upgrade the EDDS database and install the required library applications. You cannot access your Relativity environment until you complete this step. Depending on what version you're upgrading from, this process may start automatically after the installer is finished running. See Upgrading your SQL Server.
  5. Run the Relativity installer on all distributed SQL servers if present. See Distributed SQL Server upgrade.
  6. Run the Relativity installer on the Agent server. See Upgrading your agent server.
  7. Run the Relativity installer on the Web server. See Upgrading your web server.
  8. Restart the IIS.
  9. (Optional) Log in to Relativity and click the Workspace Upgrade queue. Set the priority or order on the workspaces as necessary. You can monitor your workspaces in the Monitoring upgrades with the Workspace Upgrade queue.

    Note: After you run the installer on at least one agent server, the system begins upgrading individual workspaces. You can now log in to Relativity to monitor workspace upgrades through the Workspace Upgrade queue.

  10. Upgrade your worker manager server. For more information, see the Upgrading a worker manager server installation.

    Note: If this is your first upgrade to Relativity 2023 and above, you must upgrade any worker servers after upgrading your worker manager server.

  11. Upgrade Relativity Analytics. See Upgrading or installing your Analytics server.
  12. Apply the latest hotfixes for your Relativity version. For more information, see Applying a Server hotfix or patch.