Re: PTF Best Practice? apply to separate LPAR first, or to a non-production machine?

On Mon, 08 Oct 2012 08:26:13 -0500, elehti wrote:

Pete,
Do you have an estimate of how much time (Man hours) is devoted to these
tasks you describe?

We have a development LPAR that we use for that purpose.
PTFs are always run for a month in dev, including a full system test,

before they are applied in production.

PTFs are applied monthly in all LPARs during the IPL following the

monthly system backup.

In addition to getting beat up all month by the developers, the full

system test consists of running the previous month's month end process
in dev, and comparing all the reports with production. That's part of
the regular QA schedule.

The actual ptf management tasks take only a couple of hours a month. The
month end system test and comparison/reconcilliation takes 2-4 person-
days, but that's primarily to make sure that we didn't promote a change
that broke something, not particularly for PTF validation. We'd be doing
it anyway. Operations, likewise, would be doing an IPL after the system
save, so it probably takes them on average another 15 min per LPAR, which
is hidden somewhat, because they are doing other things at the same time.
We have the luxury of a regular monthly scheduled down-time. I know
that's not typical these days.