Can I split my EMC BCVs from an HP-UX 11i system to HP-UX 11.0?

[Stuart Abramson_2]

We are going to replace our older servers with new servers that run HP-UX 11i.

Our Production Master will be HP-UX 11i.

Our BCV server, from which we do backups and run reports, is HP-UX 11.0. It is an N4000 and can continue to run HP-UX 11.0.

One of our concerns is that the 11i server will run a new JFS or something and the BCV volumes will not be readable on our HP-UX 11.0 BCV backup server.

Does anybody have experience with this?

[Jim Mallett]

Right now my Oracle production in on 11.00 and I split the BCVs every night for backup. Each week I take the BCVs and present them to our Oracle test environment which is running 11.11 and I'm able to utilize the data on the BCVs to update the data.

So I guess, to make the answer short, yes you can and no you shouldn't have any issues.

Be sure that those devices are presented to both hosts and be extra sure that you vgexport them from HostA before trying to vgimport them to HostB. Not that I had ever done that. :)

Jim

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Not by default. You will need to install JFS 3.3 (Product A3929CA)on 11.0 to support version 4 filesystems from 11i.

The other way is to create 3.1 version (version 3) filesystems on 11i. In this case, you don't have to install anything on 11.0 as 3.1 version filesystems are compatible directly with 11.0.

If you go with option 1, I suggest you create one filesystem with 3.3, mount it and make sure it shows as version 4 with 'fstyp -v' command. And probably test it with BCV splitting some dummy volumes.

-Sri

[James Murtagh]

Hi Stuart,

Here's a link to another question regarding this:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x13fc5dc05a7ad711abdc0090277a778c,00.html

Note the person is question was going forward here, i.e. 11.00 -> 11i so there was no problem. Going backwards you will have a problem though. Release 11i uses VxFS version 4 layout as standard, 11.00 uses version 3. Now you can create version 3 filesystems easily enough on 11i but the log version will still be unknown to the 11.00 release. The only solution, I believe, is to upgrade your 11.00 VxFS release to JFS 3.3 and preferably upgrade your filesystems to version 4.

Regards,

James.

[Stuart Abramson_2]

Thank you both.

We have JFS 3.3 on our N4000 BCV backup server. The Legato people recommended it for some problem that we had.

So, I should be good to go.

# swlist | grep -i jfs


B3929BA B.11.00 HP OnLineJFS (Advanced VxFS)
B3929CA B.03.03 JFS 3.3 Filesystem For 11.00

[Elif Gius]

Hi,

you will run into problems if your bcv server is HP-UX 11.00 and your production server is 11.11.
The problem is that on 11.11 there is a new JFS version which uses a different intent log version. On 11.00 these version is 6 and on 11.11 the log version is 9.
The log version 9 cannot read from an intent log version 6.

If you do a full fsck you will be still able to mount the lvols, but it is not sure that the data is consistent, because the intent log will be resetted.
The best would be to upgrade your bcv server to 11.11