Re: Skipping lots of releases - Was: Looking at Power 7

Well Yaaaaaah! Customers who hang around on V4R3 for 10 years and then jump to 7.1 cannot expect IBM to officially support such a jump. Despite the fact that it works I do not tell customers: "This is supported, smooth, or perfect." But its way better than nothing.

Trust me, I know the difference between 'Supported' and 'Works' :-) While technically there is a difference, the customer just wants to be supported when it's done.

- DrFranken

On 1/24/2011 2:26 PM, CRPence wrote:

On 1/21/11 2:21 PM, DrFranken wrote:

The upgrade method described for restoring from a "far back" release
is only supported for install over an N-2 release. The IBM conversion
routines have a design specification only to support coming from N-2,
N-1, or N-0, so any object provided as part of the OS, an option, or an
LPP that is restored from a release level from prior to N-2 may not get
converted properly to the level of the installed release, for lack of
any conversion capability from the older release. An attempt to effect
an install to greater than N+2 may cause the install of an option to
fail, or worse, the effects to be unpredictable. Typically such objects
are only those that contain "user data", and most would reside in QUSRSYS.

An upgrade from v4r3 should not include restoring any of the IBM
product\options nor especially any of the quasi-user quasi-system
libraries such as QUSRSYS, QSYS2, and QGPL [or any others], if the
installed release is more than N+2. In such a scenario skipping
multiple releases, various "user data" should be exported and then
re-imported; e.g. DSPDIRE and ADDDIRE. Installing IBM i 7.1 over
restored v4r3 objects for which an attempt will be made by that install
to "upgrade" any of those v4r3 objects [to the 7.1 equivalent object to
contain the user data, again, within an install process] is not even
close to being supported, nor likely to function well.

Regards, Chuck