Maintenance Windows & Full Builds/deployments

We are looking for examples of how other companies handle the package build, deployment, and webgen process in a 24X7 manufacturing environment. We also have a number of nightly scheduled jobs to work around.

Typically the entire process takes us 7-8 hours from start to finish but during this time there may be periods where performance is affected on the web client and outages are required to bump the Websphere services (and possibly the Enterprise servers if problems occur during server depoyment). We have four Enterprise servers (1 DB + 3 logic) and 3 web servers.

Between all environments we do on average 5-10 full builds per month depending upon the development activity.

Your experiences are appreciated.

Thanks,

Depending on your architecture, you could move all non-production environments and their logic to separate logic servers. Also, have a separate JAS server for production. These things will eliminate a big portion of your affect on production by doing package builds/deploys for non-prod environments.

For production, you can set up multiple locations for the serialized objects and gen to an offline location anytime and then during your maintenance window use OCM to make the new objects active. You will still need to bounce services for JAS however.