Re: V5R4 to V7R1 question

Bill,

First note that I AM a vendor in this space with iInTheCloud.com and have dealt with this for some time.

Caution 1) If your off-site vendor needs to find a box to run your stuff on you MIGHT want to give them the old Mark I eyeball once again. If they are just starting up in this space there is a lot to know and do. Further it means the entire cost of that machine is likely born by you and when you add the cost of hosting etc it likely won't be your best deal.

Caution 2) You DO NOT want to be on a machine today that CAN run V5R4. As has been noted that's Power6 and older. Poor choice indeed because that Power6 won't run i 7.3 meaning you're already stuck on a machine that can't get current and that's After you just did a move and upgrade!

Caution 3) If you vendor is not aware of Risc to Risc migrations this is another 'caution flag' as they may not be as savvy on IBM i as you would like them to be. As has been noted elsewhere in this thread you can upgrade from V5R4 during the migration. In this case you can jump from your old V5R4 running on anything clean up to a shiny new Power8 on i 7.1. Tape compatibility is often the biggest hurdle. The performance difference is incredible.

At of course at that point you have the option to then bump to 7.2 or 7.3 easily.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 5/26/2016 5:07 PM, Bill Howie wrote:

Hello all,

Quick and easy question for the group. We currently are running V5R4 on
our iSeries/i/etc. We are looking at upgrading to V7R1. At the same time
we're looking at migrating our machine to an offsite location to be
managed/supported by a third party vendor, which in our case would mean the
vendor would be purchasing a machine themselves and migrating our
applications to it as opposed to physically taking ours to another
location. We're hearing some interesting things from them that I am
wondering about. We are debating whether to migrate offsite first, and
then upgrade to V7R1, or go to V7R1 first. Our vendor is telling us that
"we are having a hard time locating a machine that will support V5R4",
which would enable us to do the migration first and then the OS update. Am
I not right in thinking that it doesn't matter what box we have as far as
migrating between releases? I mean, I think we could if we wanted to just
put our current box in a truck and take it to the new location and then
upgrade that SAME box and achieve what we're talking about. There's no
such thing in the iSeries world as a box that doesn't support previous
releases, right? Please, tell me I'm not crazy. Thanks all!

Bill