RE: Deployability Issue

I'll chip in with my complaints about our V5R2-V5R3 (WAF/CM V5R1-V5R3)
upgrade.

During previous upgrades we had always upgraded the O/S first, then ran
a week or two before doing the WAF upgrade.  This allowed us to shake
down the O/S a little and also to segregate any O/S issues from any
WAF/CM issues.  During the V5R1 upgrade this saved our butts because we
were able to isolate a severe performance issue after the WAF upgrade.

During the V5R3 upgrade we were REQUIRED to upgrade 5722VI1
concurrently, which meant that in addition to the O/S upgrade (during
which you might recall we had several image catalog failures) we then
had to apply CM PTFs and WAF PTFs (which are not included with cume
packages or in the "normal" PTF facility and must be downloaded from the
WAF and CM websites and applied separately.)  Then we had to run the
upgrade file conversions for both components and finally we had to
recompile all of our custom code that uses the converted WAF files
(which in this case is most of them since with V5R3 WAF is converting
User ID fields to 10 characters from 8, even though WAF still does not
support these 10 character Ids.)

I (fortunately) got to do this upgrade six times in our test environment
and found that neither WAF nor CM would work if they were not upgraded
with the O/S; the CM and WAF upgrade conversions and the program
recompiles also had to be completed before either were operational.  

Bottom line, our production upgrade is currently on hold and when we do
get around to it I will likely be working an 18-24 hour day instead of
the usual 8-12 hour upgrade.  While I do not consider this to be
"undeployable" it is MUCH more difficult than previous releases.  I
should also add that we have not as of yet done any performance testing
of this so I cannot add any information regarding Walden's issues.

Regards,
 
Scott Ingvaldson
iSeries System Administrator
GuideOne Insurance Group


-----Original Message-----
date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 18:29:21 -0500
from: "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: RE: Deployability Issue

I'm a bit vexed, especially since I normally don't expect this sort of
thing from you, Walden.  First you make several negative comments about
a perceived instability in the iSeries, and then you won't even bother
to respond after it turns out the problem perhaps wasn't so bad after
all.

You might say that this isn't the forum to address such issues, but you
brought it up in this forum, you publicly declared the software
"undeployable" right here in this very list and used it as proof of your
assertion of an ongoing destabilization of the platform.

Though I'm sure you didn't intend it this way, the result is roughly
analogous to a sleazy tabloid printing outrageous comments about drug
abuse and sex scandals on the front page, then retracting them on page
32 several weeks later.

Anyway, I'll tell the folks at IBM that it was a false alarm.

Joe



> From: Joe Pluta
> 
> Walden, can I tell the IBM folks to stand down?  Or are you still
> insisting that the DB2 Content Manager for iSeries software is
> "undeployable"?