Upgrade of products with expired license

[maksymdomin]

Hello,

I've been a long term loyal customer of Atlassian and used Jira & Confluence for my personal needs for more than 10 years. Last month my licenses have been expired - well, I totally understand that company develops its new future and insists all to move to "cloud". That's fine. But I don't understand why I can't upgrade servers to the latest version of products released BEFORE the expiration date? So, my license for Jira has expired at Feb/15, and I continued to use 9.12.2 up to today, when I tried to upgrade to 9.12.5 (the latest one). I've got a message that my license isn't for this release, so I rolled it back to 9.12.2 and now I can't start Jira Server anymore - it is saying that my license too old even for the legit version! In the meantime my Confluence server works without any problem - I was able to upgrade it to the 8.5.6.

So, how to upgrade Jira to 9.12.4 (the latest one for my license)? Please advise.

Thank you.

[maksymdomin · Accepted solution]

Okay, I managed to upgrade to 9.12.4 - I restored Jira home directory from the backup, then started 9.12.4 again and that's it.

[Sue Bridges]

Your Q&A should be very useful to me, so many thanks.  However, please could you clarify your upgrade steps?  I read this on the April 2024 security bulletin:

• I am running a server version of my product - can I still upgrade? Be aware that upgrading with an expired server license will make your instance unavailable.  Please refer to Atlassian's server end of support documentation

My situation is that I am running on 9.12.2 (and 9.12.1 on another Server).  My license has expired as of Feb 2024, but Atlassian still bring out security fixes for the last LTS 9.12.x.  We are not planning on moving to Cloud, but I had assumed that I would be able to get to the last ever LTS 9.12.x to get as many security fixes etc. as possible at some point using the Atlassian upgrade wizard.

Reading the security bulletin, I suddenly thought that is not going to be the case which I was a bit annoyed about and was going to take it up with Atlassian.  But, then you said that you had completed an upgrade...

So is it a fluke you upgraded, or will I be able to do an upgrade? 

I am a bit confused of the situation, and have enough hassle upgrading our really small simple Jira without having the usual maybe it'll upgrade or not and have to rollback.

Would appreciate clear steps.

Many thanks

Sue

[Boris T]

Hi Sue,

You can only upgrade to version that was released prior to license expiration date Feb 15, 2024. We can only upgrade to 9.12.4 because release date was Feb 12th, 2024 ( https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/issues-resolved-in-9-12-4-1354596840.html ) 

[Sue Bridges]

Hi, thanks for the response.  That makes sense up to a point, but I didn't realise you could even license the Server product after 15 Feb.  Atlassian are already on 9.12.7 (April 2024).  Who is going to be able to upgrade to that?

[Boris T]

You can not get Server license after Feb 15. Anyone with Data Center subscription/license can upgrade to latest 9.12.x version. 

[Sue Bridges]

Oh yes, of course, silly me.  Just jealous.  At least I know my terminal release, so might as well download it now for future installation.  Many thanks.

[Boris T]

Can someone from Atlassian please clarify what does this mean (i.e. text in bold)?

"Starting from 9.13, new Jira releases support only Data Center licenses. If you try to upgrade to release 9.13 or later with your Server license, Jira will fail to start, and you’ll need to downgrade to the version you were on before the upgrade.

If you’d like to continue using a Server license, you can upgrade to Jira 9.12 version or earlier.

Learn more about your upgrade options"

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/download-archives

[Sue Bridges]

9.12.x is terminal release for Server (rather than Data Center).  Thanks for confirming that my terminal release is actually 9.12.4 - gotcha.  However, if it's by license date that's just odd, as I couldn't buy an extended date after end of license sales end of 15 Feb 2024.  I didn't realise from the literature that it was possible....  Who can actually install 9.12.5 onwards then?

Without knowing about this license date and installation issue, I had hoped that I'd just be able to upgrade to later 9.12.x software and end up on a terminal release.