Re: V6R1 upgrade from V5R4

Do be sure you are clear with the customer on what are your responsibilities and theirs. Some customers happily accept the program conversion as theirs and others exclaim "That's part of the upgrade right?". Also be aware that you'll need to do PTFs after the upgrade (unless you use media with PTFs already included as I do) as PTFs can take nearly as long as the upgrade itself. Also the Number (and to a lessor extent performance) of disks in the system and the protection type make a HUGE difference in time on these smaller machines. You've got lots of CPW in there (likely 4300) but if you've got 2 drives mirrored with no cache, you'll be at this for over 24 hours. If you've got 18 SAS drives RAIDed it will be more like 5. Also be very clear on who's doing the backups and any system prep such as *REQUIRED* ptfs before the upgrade (See very recent posts today) You must do backups before and should do them after. Which tape drive you have will impact that time dramatically.

It works out that Bruce probably wasn't being flippant when he said: "8 to 16 hours" because we don't have nearly enough to go on.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis.

Thank you for your answers. I am lucky in the respect that I am only responsible for upgrading the OS. The customer will do all the other work.


---- "Mark S. Waterbury"<mark.s.waterbury@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi, Dave:

**First, you must read this RedBook:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4293.html

Then instruct the customer read it and follow the procedures described
in this RedBook.

Next, the customer (perhaps with your assistance) needs to study the
results of running the ANZOBJCVN command (reports), to see what objects
on their system cannot be converted, and then take steps to decide what
to do about it, if any such objects are found.

Once you have the results of running ANZOBJCVN, you can begin to assess
the effort required to do this upgrade. For example, they might have
some vendor packages or applications that need to be updated to a
V6R1-Ready version. And, some of their own in-house applications code
might need to be recompiled to ensure that they have 100% observable
code. (This is explained in that RedBook.)

Otherwise, you could end up having an unpleasant "learning experience."
For example, you could tell them "it will take 24 hours" and do the
upgrade over a week-end, only to discover that some of their
mission-critical programs or vendor applications do not have all of the
required observability and cannot be converted to run on V6R1. At that
point, you would have a very unhappy customer who is "dead in the
water". The only recourse would be to restore everything to V5R4 again,
assuming you (or they) have a "known good" complete back-up of
everything, to allow them to be able to continue running until such time
as those issues can be resolved.

All the best,

Mark S. Waterbury

I know this is a loaded question BUT I had a customer call and ask, If we decide to upgrade to V6R1 from V5R4, how long will it take?

The system is an 8203 E4A with over 58% disk free.

All I am asking is for a ball park figure as to the estimated time to apply and complete the upgrade. I will be downloading the upgrade from IBm and using image catalogs

Thanks
Dave Willenborg
FNTS
Omaha NE