What Brian said. Another take on the UPGRADE/REPLACEMENT choice. From the get-go of ServerPac, we always did system replacement. For 2.1, I decided to try upgrade. After slogging into it like a trekker with only one snowshoe, I realized that I was in big trouble. I put some questions to IBM, who conceded that we would need to change our entire installation and migration strategy. Not worth the trouble nor the time. I started over with full replacement.
Since a similar topic comes up now and then, let me make yet another pitch for a 'hybrid' process. We follow the REPLACEMENT path except that we never actually use the supplied versions of crucial installation-centric components. That is, at run time, we use our own master catalog, our own JES spool, our own RACF database, our own PARMLIB/PROCLIB, and so on. The ones that get created during ServerPac install are discarded. For example, on one system running under R13, the master catalog has a creation date of 1983.193. That pretty much dates to the introduction of ICF catalogs. Trying to tailor such ServerPac components for each new release leads to much churning and hand wringing. As well as questions to IBM Main. ;-) . . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 626-302-7535 Office 323-715-0595 Mobile [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian Westerman Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2015 9:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Effort to upgrade V1R13 to V2R1? I tend to agree that system replacement can be quite a bit faster than upgrade, but having done this several times in the past two years I think 1 month is reasonable which includes planning to cut-over implementation for a replacement. Upgrading can be a whole different animal because there can (and will) be a number of exits and other site specific items which have to be altered. Most exits will have no problem at all, but you still have to check them all. I have also come to believe that there is no such thing as a "vanilla" z/OS shop. Just being a systems programmer, even a very good one, doesn't mean that you have installed z/OS, or that you can handle the conversion. That's one of the reasons that consultants are still in such demand. When it comes to upgrading, nothing beats experience. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
