A zero-downtime Magnolia 6.2 to 6.4 upgrade
A blue/green upgrade of a Victorian government mental-health platform from Magnolia 6.2 to 6.4, modernising the stack to Java 17 and Jakarta EE 10 with no downtime and the full content tree verified intact.
Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing / Magnolia DXP / Platform Upgrade / Zero Downtime / Government / Managed Services
6.2 → 6.4
Magnolia version uplift
Zero
Downtime at cutover
One week
Upgrade delivered end to end
100%
Content tree verified post-cutover
Project summary
The Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing runs its public website on the Magnolia Digital Experience Platform, hosted on Magnolia Cloud in the APAC region. With Magnolia 6.2 approaching the end of its support window, the platform needed to move to 6.4 to stay fully supported and secure.
A major-version Magnolia upgrade is not a patch. Moving to 6.4 meant migrating the code base to Java 17 and Jakarta EE 10, refreshing the MicroProfile and REST dependencies, and upgrading the search tier to Apache Solr 10. All of it had to happen without taking down a live public resource that people rely on to find mental-health support.
Noice planned and delivered the upgrade end to end: dependency modernisation, search upgrade, a short controlled content freeze, full backups, and a blue/green production cutover. The site moved to 6.4 with no downtime, every page and asset verified intact, and the whole upgrade delivered in a single week - with the new capabilities that ship with 6.4 enabled for the Collaborative Centre's authoring team.
About the client
The Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing is a Victorian Government statutory authority established to strengthen mental health and wellbeing across Victoria through collaboration, research, workforce development, translation of evidence into practice, and the expertise of people with Lived and Living Experience.
The website is a key gateway to the Collaborative Centre's work, providing access to evidence, resources, events, research, workforce development opportunities and organisational information for the mental health and wellbeing workforce, people with Lived and Living Experience, researchers, partners, policymakers and the broader community. Ensuring the website remains accessible, reliable and current is critical to supporting the Collaborative Centre's purpose and impact.
Noice provides ongoing support for the Collaborative Centre's digital experience platform, including the Magnolia website, custom application development and managed support services.
A breaking-change upgrade on a live public platform
The jump from Magnolia 6.2 to 6.4 carries real engineering risk. The work had to address:
- The Jakarta EE 10 namespace migration, a breaking change that touches code across the platform
- A move to the Java 17 runtime, plus refreshed MicroProfile and REST v2 dependencies
- An upgrade and reindex of the search tier to Apache Solr 10
- Preserving the full content tree, authoring experience, and integrations through the move
- Zero tolerance for downtime or content loss on a public mental-health resource
The brief was simple to state and hard to do: get to a fully supported release without anyone visiting the site ever noticing.
Plan first, prove on dev, then cut over
Noice ran the upgrade as a sequenced, low-risk programme rather than a big-bang switch:
- Worked through the Magnolia upgrade guide and 6.3 and 6.4 release notes to map every breaking change before touching code
- Modernised the code base to Java 17 and Jakarta EE 10, with MicroProfile and REST v2 updates
- Upgraded the search tier to Apache Solr 10, then rebuilt the search index for like-for-like results
- Stood the whole upgrade up on a development environment first and tested authoring parity against production
- Ran Magnolia's pre-go-live check with the Magnolia Cloud team, who provisioned the parallel production nodes for the cutover
- Coordinated a short, agreed content freeze with the Collaborative Centre team and took full backups before cutover
By the time the production cutover arrived, the upgrade had already been proven on a mirror of the live environment, with a runsheet and a rehearsed rollback path ready.
A blue/green switch with zero downtime
The moment that mattered
Production moved to 6.4 with a blue/green cutover. The upgraded environment was brought up in parallel with the live one, validated, and only then promoted to serve traffic. Visitors stayed on a working site the entire time.
Step 1 - Build alongside
Blue
Magnolia 6.2
● Live
Green
Magnolia 6.4
In build + test
The new 6.4 environment is built and tested next to the live site. Visitors keep using 6.2, unaware.
Step 2 - Switch
Blue
Magnolia 6.2
Standing by (rollback)
Green
Magnolia 6.4
● Live
Once proven, traffic switches to 6.4 in one move. No downtime - visitors never notice.
Step 3 - Retire
Blue
Magnolia 6.2
Retired
Green
Magnolia 6.4
● Live
The old 6.2 environment is retired. Rollback stayed available right up to this point.
Immediately after the switch, the team ran a content-migration verification pass to confirm the full content tree, assets, and structure had come across correctly. Nothing was missing, and nothing had drifted.
If anything, the upgrade itself was the calm part, and the whole thing was done in a week. The most demanding piece of the project was organisational rather than technical: lining up a content freeze across the Collaborative Centre's content owners so the cutover had a single, stable snapshot to migrate. Noice planned that window with the team, kept it tight, and scheduled the switch around it.
The bar was set at the start: get to a fully supported release without anyone visiting the site ever noticing. The blue/green cutover cleared it.
Current, supported, and ready for what comes next
- The public site moved to Magnolia 6.4 with no downtime during cutover
- The full content tree, assets, and structure were verified intact post-cutover
- Delivered end to end in a single week, inside the agreed content-freeze window
- Now on a fully supported release with a modern Java 17 and Jakarta EE 10 stack and Apache Solr 10 search
- New 6.4 capabilities enabled for the authoring team, including the accessible React-based authoring experience and faster asynchronous publishing
- Reduced security and compatibility risk, and a clean base for the next phase of platform work
- Backed by Noice’s ongoing managed support
Technology summary
CMS
Magnolia DXP, upgraded 6.2 to 6.4
Hosting
Magnolia Cloud managed PaaS, APAC region
Runtime
Java 17, Jakarta EE 10, MicroProfile, REST v2
Search
Apache Solr 10
CDN
Fastly
Cutover
Blue/green, zero downtime
“Noice upgraded our Magnolia platform from 6.2 to 6.4 without a minute of downtime on our public site. The cutover was meticulously planned, every piece of content came across intact, and the whole thing landed exactly to schedule.”
Catherine Herman, Senior Digital and Data Officer, Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing
A major-version Magnolia upgrade, delivered the way it should be: planned thoroughly, proven on a mirror of production, and switched over with no downtime and no content loss. The platform is now current, secure, and ready for what comes next.
Planning a Magnolia upgrade of your own? See our Magnolia 6.4 upgrade service and our Magnolia CMS practice. We are an APAC Magnolia Platinum Partner.