Upgrade Plan - Web Shop - NWDI

Question

Hi Experts,
My customer has planned to upgrade their portal from version 7.01 to 7.02 SPS4. They have four environments namely Dev, Quality, Acceptance & Production. They plan to upgrade Dev first, followed by Acceptance & then Production. (Quality is kept as it is for incident mitigation till Production is patched)
The portal is effectively an e-commerce portal which has both portal components & Web shop deployed on it. The Web Shop code is hosted on NWDI which is configured to build the Dev server once the code is checked in.
Now these are my questions:
1. Lets say that while Dev is being upgraded, we need to fix a critical incident involving web shop code. Can we configure NWDI to build Quality rather than Dev. The current setup is that transports need to be done sequentially i.e. D->Q->A->P.
And even if build fails in Quality, can i directly configure NWDI to point to production and do the build there?
2. Is it possible to register the same instance multiple times (say quality instance)under 'target instance'. Will this help me at all?
Regards,
Ramanathan Palaniappan

Answer 1

Hi Ramanathan,
First of all let me make one thing clear.
No matter how many Runtime systems you have in your landscape (In your case D->Q->A->P), your NWDI usage type or instance, whether it is hosted on your Development Server or some different host separately is common across these systems.
To give you more clarity you need to understand the following concepts.
1) Your Landscape consists D->Q->A->P.
2) Here, lets assume that NWDI is running on your Development Server D.
3) That means all the 3 pillars (DTR, CBS & CMS) of NWDI are present in Dev host.
4) Now, Suppose are maintaining a Track named "Track-A"
5) Whatever developments that are carried out (Source Code Modification) specific to "Track-A" are available in the DTR-Server present Dev Host only.
6) So, the Build process is also specific to Development Host ONLY
7) You cannot use terms like "Can we configure NWDI to build Quality rather than Dev", it simply doesn't make sense.
OK, so far so good.
Lets move further ahead.
There's a big difference between Build process and Deploy Process.
1) When you create a Track, you need to define the Runtime Systems of your Track.
2) When you define runtime systems, your purpose is to provide information to the CMS about--> to which all systems you will be DEPLOYING your Compiled Source Code (Which is in the form .SCA that is created as an output in Assembly step) 
3) Build Process as explained above happens only on Development Host in Development Buildspace and Consolidation Buildspace of your Track.
You can also refer to the thread where i have explains step-by-step process about what happens under the hood in NWDI
Re: Comparing records in Update Rules
Now, if you meant to configure NWDI to point Quality rather than Dev in terms of Deployment only then Yes, It is very much possible.
Follow the below mentioned procedure...
1) Open the CMS Web UI >> Landscape Configurator >> Track Data >> Runtime Systems
2) Here, you can configure your runtime system as you wish.
3) For Example if you want to skip the deployment into Quality and directly deploy in production then you can uncheck the "Test" from Selected Runtime Systems.
After you modify the setting in Runtime systems in Landscape configurator, then relevant changes will be reflected in the Transport Studio of your track. Considering the above example The "Test" tab will not be available.
I hope my inputs will help you resolve your query.
Regards,
Shreyas Pandya