On Wed, 5 Sep 2012 23:41:53 -0500, Dennis Schaffer <[email protected]> wrote:
>Its been four years since my esteemed colleague, Robert, asked this question >about "phased maintenance". He wanted to understand the experiences of those >of you who implement maintenance and new releases within the same sysplex by >performing rolling LPAR IPLs across multiple days or weeks. > >I'd appreciate any feedback you can provide on your current phased maintenance >implementation experiences, especially when the mixed-maintenance environment >coexists for a week or longer on major production systems. > Hi Dennis, We do rolling ipl's across our sysplex's that take the kind of time frames that you are talking about. Our maintenance philosophy is that annually we have introduced a package that included the current release of z/os and new release's or maintenance for about 40 to 50 isv's or IBM products including CICS. This is a package that we build and test and then roll out thru our 6 sysplex's. In our User Acceptance Test system (2 system sysplex) we ipl on one of the systems and then 2 to 3 weeks later on the other. In our 2 production sysplexes we ipl 1/2 of the systems in the plex and then about a month later we do the other half. We also annually do 2 maintenance roll outs to all the sysplex's using the above methodology. We have never had a problem related to having 2 levels of the systems in the sysplex. In fact we like this because it gives us a place to run jobs that may be having issues with the upgraded system until we can get a fix for a problem that was introduced by the up level system. Doug Henry USBank ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
