In the course of Connections CR Updates I also tend to update all WebSphere Components to the latest supported version. Currently for Connections 5 CR2 & CR3 the latest supported Application Server is WebSphere 8.5.5.4.
Quite recently we needed to update a Connections environment from 5 CR1 to 5 CR2. This Environment consists of four nodes, on two of them we have Connections applications running in a cluster, the other two are used for IBM Docs applications, also clustered. One of the nodes where Connections Software is running is also a Deployment Manager.
The initial plan was to update WebSphere Nodes, to 8.5.5.4, only on which Connections is running. We wanted to update remaining nodes later on, in the course of IBM Docs Update. This was a very bad idea, after the Update, the two IBM Docs nodes, running the older version of WebSphere, started getting out of sync, causing Docs applications to stop working.
Manual Synchronization, using “syncNode.bat” file, seemed to resolve the problem for a short period, but only after we updated the IBM Docs Nodes to the 8.5.5.4 version we managed to solve the synchronization issue.
So beware of running different node versions of WAS in a single cell.