Hi, Sorry I didn't see this sooner, I was at a client site, who strangely enough, was also converting from 1.7 to 1.11. I don't normally have (or want) to go to a site to do the upgrade, but in this case there were some extenuating circumstances that made it logical to be there in person. The location wasn't a hardship in any way, but in this particular case not only were they upgrading the OS, but the hardware (computer/DASD/TAPES, etc) was changed, and the computer center site itself was moved, so a lot of pre-planning had to be done to make sure it all came off without a hitch. In general, I don't normally suggest clients migrate and move at the same time, but as I said, this was a VERY special case. Anyway, it was a non-event. The total outage for the users was about 5 seconds and even that "could" have been avoided, which was good for the client, but I did have to deal with IBM and another hardware vendor in person, (I'm friendlier via email with hardware people, but sometimes they just didn't listen or head the original email "suggestions"), but they came around fairly quickly.
Depending on your installed software and the hardware you are using, the conversion can be VERY simple or can have a couple small snags, but nothing that you won't hit even if you did it the "IBM" supported way (i.e. two jumps). You don't have to worry about sharing dasd (if you don't have GRS or MIM then be VERY careful and control it completely). You can (and should) share catalogs, and you can use the same RACF database. You can share the spool, but I ALWAYS advise against it, instead use NJE if you need (near) instant access, or offload if you don't. If you are currently in a plex and are thinking about migrating the plex as a single unit you can forget about it right now, as that isn't a good idea. How you handle a plex is a bit too complicated to discuss here (especially when it might not even apply), but if you are currently running a plex, then this will be a good chance for you to get some skills in generating a new one, (and you can correct old issues at the same time). You didn't say if you were running CICS, IMS, DB/2 or some other database, but they too may need to be addressed, depending on where you are starting and stopping with respect to those subsystems. There are also a lot of new features that you can take advantage of (depending on your hardware), but in some cases you have to weigh the advantages of a quick conversion with the advantages of some of the new features and decide if including them in your conversion is a good idea or not. You can contact me offline if you have questions or want to talk about the specifics of your site, (or you can post them here if you really want to, but I wouldn't normally suggest that). Brian Westerman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
