RE: Upgrading V5R2 to V5R3 -- MIDRANGE-L

Thanks for the great info, Scott.  It gives me a lot of food for
thought.

We're running a 720 series machine here, and we are currently
experiencing some performance issues (internal issues with the previous
programming team's work), so I might hold off on the upgrade.

Thanks again,

Brian.

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Klement [mailto:midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 12:12 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Upgrading V5R2 to V5R3

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
what 
needs to be done to upgrade.  They also provide a "memo to users" that 
spotlights everything that the upgrade could break.

You (or whomever is doing this) should start by going to the IBM 
information 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 know 
everything that will break or will need upgrading.

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

This can be a long tedious process, so many people skip it.  If you do 
that, you won't find out what'll break until the upgrade is complete...
I 
guess 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 production 
> machine (we had problems last time we went from v4r5 to v5r2), but I'm

> wondering if that was because it was a major upgrade instead of a 
> minor(?) upgrade.

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

Once you've gone over the "memo to users" and talked to your vendors,
the 
steps 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/fastpa
thrzahc.htm

Once again, there are a lot of steps, and a lot of people will skip many

of them to save time. Following those steps can be time consuming and 
tedious.  But, if you don't follow them all, and you miss something, you

could 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 had

several performance issues with V5R3. The HTTP server seems
significantly 
slower (comparing Apache on V5R2 to Apache on V5R3).  Using a TAPF (tape

file) is horribly resource intensive and takes about 40% longer than it 
did previously. Everything else seems to run slightly slower, except 
database queries, those seem faster.

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

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