After you complete the steps in this topic, you will have installed or upgraded the Software AG product installations in your environment through Command Central stacks.

A stack represents a set of product installations. In the stack, the products from the installations are organized in logical layers, see Understanding Software Stacks. The layers in the stack refer to Command Central templates, which have the details required to install or upgrade the products. The templates are imported in Command Central and you can define layers in different stacks that refer to the same template. Based on how you run the stack, you can create fresh installations or upgrade the existing installations that Command Central manages.

Moderate to Low. When you work with the Command Central stacks, most of the install or upgrade actions are automated, but you should be familiar with how the products in the webMethods product suite interact and work together.

The repositories are the source of the product or fix installation files. You can connect to the Software AG repositories (hosted on Empower and added in Command Central as master repositories), create a local copy of the Empower repositories (added as mirror repositories), or use a product or fix image (created by the Software AG Installer or Software AG Update Manager and added as an image repository). Command Central will use the repositories to install the products and apply the fixes available for those products.

Import the license keys for the products that you want to install (or upgrade) and assign an alias to each license key: Import Product License Keys for Instances or Components and sagcc add license-tools keys.

Check if the UNIX or Windows operating system on the remote machine has a Secure Shell (SSH) server running. Also, make sure that the system is configured for remote access with the user account for the Software AG products.

Use one of the following options to create a stack:

Create one or more properties files with the values that you must specify for the required input parameters of the layers in the stack. You can also customize other parameters in the layers with a properties file, for example if you want to specify different values for different environments. In the Stacks view of the Command Central web user interface, you can import the properties file(s) that you want to use for the layers in a stack. You can also export the parameters you specify for a layer into a properties file.

After you create a layer in a stack and specify the required properties for the layer, Command Central installs the products in the layer automatically on the specified host machines.

When you want to upgrade product installations through a stack, you can conduct a dry run of the upgrade to identify and troubleshoot issues before the actual upgrade. During the dry run, Command Central generates the migration templates for the upgrade, but does not apply them on the target machines. For instructions how to run the upgrade operation, see "Create an Upgraded Installation Using Command Central and Software Stacks (10.1 and Later)" in Upgrading Software AG Products On Premises.

Note that if you have custom files and configurations that should get copied (such as adapter jar files), you must run the upgrade as follows:

Use the Jobs view in the Command Central web user interface to monitor the status of the template apply job and access the logs: Correcting a Failed Composite Template Apply Operation.