Re: Upgrading V5R2 to V5R3 -- MIDRANGE-L

Hi Brian,

As you may have seen in a previous message, our iSeries is currently
sitting at v5r2.  How difficult is it to upgrade to v5r3.

In every release of OS/400, they provide in-depth documentation about whatneeds to be done to upgrade. They also provide a "memo to users" thatspotlights everything that the upgrade could break.

You (or whomever is doing this) should start by going to the IBMinformation center

  http://www.iseries.ibm.com/infocenter

Choose the V5R3 release.

On the front page for the V5R3 info center, you'll see a document entitled"memo to users". Read it carefully if you want to be sure you knoweverything that will break or will need upgrading.

You'll also want to contact your software vendors to see if anythingyou're running needs to be patched or updated for V5R3.

This can be a long tedious process, so many people skip it. If you dothat, you won't find out what'll break until the upgrade is complete... Iguess that's up to you :)

Is there anything specific that needs to be done (next to an Option 21)to perform an upgrade? I'd be concerned about killing our productionmachine (we had problems last time we went from v4r5 to v5r2), but I'mwondering if that was because it was a major upgrade instead of aminor(?) upgrade.

By "option 21" I assume you mean that you're making a backup of thesystem. Always a good thing to do before you begin so that you canrestore the system if something goes wrong -- but it's not (strictlyspeaking) part of the upgrade. (Unless, of course, you're switching to anew machine, and want to use those tapes to restore your objects on thenew machine.)

Once you've gone over the "memo to users" and talked to your vendors, thesteps to perform the actual upgrade can be found in the info center under

"Install, Upgrade or Delete i5/OS and related software".

Here'e a link to the "fast path" for installation:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r3/topic/rzahc/fastpathrzahc.htm

Once again, there are a lot of steps, and a lot of people will skip manyof them to save time. Following those steps can be time consuming andtedious. But, if you don't follow them all, and you miss something, youcould have problems. How cautious you want to be is up to you.

Personally (and this isn't documented anywhere that I've found) I've hadseveral performance issues with V5R3. The HTTP server seems significantlyslower (comparing Apache on V5R2 to Apache on V5R3). Using a TAPF (tapefile) is horribly resource intensive and takes about 40% longer than itdid previously. Everything else seems to run slightly slower, exceptdatabase queries, those seem faster.

We even added additional RAM to try to improve things, and it helped alittle, but it's still not close to what it was at V5R2 (even though wehad less RAM on V5R2)

I don't know if you'll have the same problems, but it's something to thinkabout...