Vpar and Ignite and restructure filesystem

[Coolmar]

I have an older system (hpux 11.0) that someone created a while ago where everything is in "/". In other words, there is only one logical volume (/) and var, opt, usr, tmp are all just directories within root (/). We are moving this system to a new system which is a vpar. The vpar is already setup properly (a logical volume for each filesystem) from an Ignite server. The new server (vpar) is also HPUX 11.11. My question is that I have to move /var /usr /tmp /opt over from the old - remember they are only directories and not logical volumes/filesystems. Plus I don't think I can boot an ignite tape from a vpar. So, how to I get those old "directories" into the new filesystems on the new server? Secondly, I would end up overwriting all the new filesystems which are at 11.11 with the old directories which are 11.0...could that really mess things up?

I guess I am just looking for some ideas from you folks. Thanks!

[Patrick Wallek]

OK, I'm REALLY confused as to what exactly you are trying to accomplish here.

Point 1 - You've got an 11.0 machine with a huge / partition.

Point 2 - The functions of this machine are moving to an 11.11 VPAR.

I'm not real sure I see what one has to do with the other.

You've got the VPAR installed with 11.11, which, I assume, has everything split up into individual LV's for the VG00/OS stuff. That is how it should be.

Now you keep mentioning copying stuff from /var, /usr, /tmp, etc. from the 11.0 to the 11.11 system. Why do you want to do that? I'm not sure what that would gain you other than really screwing up your 11.11 VPAR.

You could copy selected configuration files from one machine to the other, but under no circumstances would I copy your entire 11.0 VG00 to the 11.11 VPAR.

[Coolmar]

Well I guess to avoid combing through each directory to only move select files over one at a time. Each directory - well not /tmp - but /var /opt /home /usr all have custom scripts, software, etc. I want to move that over to the new system and at the same time move them to their *own* logical volumes rather than everything to one big / filesystem for obvious reasons. So I want to know if I can copy those directories to the new file systems using ignite, or do I just straight copy? Will there be a problem with moving 11.0 filesystems onto 11.11 filesystems?

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

/home should not be a problem. You can copy that from 11.0 to 11.11 directly. As long as /home is mounted as its own filesystem when you do the copy, it will go into its filesystem on the 11.11 machine.

As for /var, /opt and /usr -- There is absolutely no way I would try to copy those directly from 11.0 to 11.11. It's not a question if you will cause a problem on 11.11, it's a question of how big of a problem you will cause on the 11.11 VPAR. Because you will definitely cause problems.

Most of your 11.11 executables and libraries are in /usr (/usr/lib, /usr/bin, etc...). You IPD, product list and backups from patch installs are in /var/adm/sw and the 2 definitely will be different between 11.0 and 11.11.

/opt has other products that are installed with 11.11 and while the 11.0 versions *MAY* work, you will still have lots of grief if you copy the whole directory.

To do this correctly you will HAVE to go through and find *ONLY* what you need from 11.0 and copy to 11.11.

If you have sufficient space on your VPAR, you could create another LVOL, mount it, and call it something like /old_11.0_stuff, and copy your 11.0 stuff to it. Then you can go through and copy whatever you require from the old to the new.

But UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES do you want to copy /var, /opt and /usr from your 11.0 to your 11.11 VPAR. Just don't do it!!!!!

[Coolmar]

Thanks for your advice. Makes perfect sense.

S.

[Anthony Lennan]

Hi Sally,

As Patrick has pointed out, you have two seperate issues.

The first issue that you have is that you want to upgrade from 11.00 to 11.11. You must not copy your 11.00 binaries to your new machine running 11.11 as you will definitely screw things up.

Ignoring vpars for the moment, hypothetically if you were looking to just upgrade from 11.00 to 11.11 and then move to a new server, I would maybe look at doing an OS upgrade on the old server and then taking an ignite image and installing it on the new server. You can find out more information about that here:
http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-0662/ch04.html

BUT your case is a lot more complex because you have vpars (which are already setup) and because I'm guessing you don't want to impact your old server before you move to the new one.

In this case I can only really think of doing it the old fashioned way. ie. Install the OS. Install the applications. You've already mentioned that your vpars are setup and configured. Therefore you're kind of half way there.

The next step is to get the 11.11 version of your applications and install them on your new server in the approriate vpars.
You will then have to configure the apps or if the apps versions are staying the same you may be able to restore the remaining files from your old server.

Make sure you have clear plan of how your going to complete the migration before you begin and let us know how you go :)

Rgds,
Anthony

[Coolmar]

Thanks guys!