DFG and OS upgrades

[roose]

Hi all,

We will be having an OS upgrade of our ES80 clusters (2 2-node clusters) from v7.3-1 to v7.3-2, and we currently have DFG v2.8 on these clusters.

During the upgrade timeframe, we are also planning to do a backup/restore of our system disk for disk maintenance. What we plan to do during this disk maintenance will be to boot using the OS disc, do an analyze/disk/repair on the system disk, backup/image the OS disk to a saveset on another disk, and once done, restore the saveset to the current system disk.

Going over the DFG documentation, it was mentioned that if we need to upgrade the DFG itself to v2.9, but nothing mentioned about OS upgrade, we need to do a set file/nomove on the OS disk before the DFG upgrade. My question is: do we need to a set file/nomove on the OS disk because of the OS upgrade, or do we need it because we did a backup/restore on the OS disk, or both?

[Karl Rohwedder]

The Backup/Restore cycle should preserve the file attributes, i.e. the NOMOVE should be kept.
Since the OS-upgrade may add new files to the systemdisk, I would reapply the SETFILENOMOVE routine after the os-upgrade.

regards Kalle

[John Gillings · Accepted solution]

Roose,

SETFILENOMOVE really shouldn't be required at all, as any upgrades should mark their own files as NOMOVE if it's necessary. However, since it's OpenVMS we make sure by having at least two ways of confirming it's correct. It certainly won't hurt to execute SETFILENOMOVE after your upgrade (or, for that matter, any patch or other significant change to your system disk).

So, you probably don't need to do it, but if you're cautious, all it costs is a bit of extra time.

> backup/image the OS disk to a saveset
>on another disk, and once done, restore
>the saveset to the current system disk.

I'd recommend instead of backup to a saveset on another disk, you do a disk to disk backup and simply swap physical disks. This will be faster and much safer as you always retain the original disk as a fallback.

If you have sufficient disk drives (and if you don't, go buy some! very cheap insurance ;-), I recommend you perform any upgrade like this:

1) image backup existing system disk to spare drive
2) put original system disk somewhere safe
3) perform upgrade on copy
4) image backup upgraded disk to another disk
5) use final disk as your new production system disk.

This means you have your original disk as a fallback. You also have the "just upgraded" state as a fallback, or to compare with the original drive, or the new drive.

The idea is to always have an immediate fallback if something goes wrong.

[roose]

Thank you folks for your inputs!

Regards,
Roose