Is it necessary to stop the Policy Servers when upgrading Policy Store?

Products

• SITEMINDER

Issue/Introduction

The customer wants to perform an “In-Place Upgrade”.

They do not want their production to be stopped during the upgrade.

However, in the documentation, “Upgrade Policy Store”,  the final step is to "Restart all Policy Servers."

Upgrade Policy Store
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/identity-security/siteminder/12-8/upgrading/in-place-upgrade/upgrade-policy-store.html

Restart all Policy Servers
Complete the policy store upgrade by restarting all Policy Servers that are communicating with the policy store.

Environment

Applies to 12.8.X Policy Server

Any OS

Resolution

The documentation is correct, the Policy Servers need to be restarted so they can reload the new Policy Store objects.

However, the only outage should occur when restarting the policy server(s).

Keep in mind these two points-

1) Consider performing the upgrade when the active user volume will be low.

2) The restarts can be performed in a rolling method vs all at once.