LH Server Support after Win2003 Upgrade

[Ian at OBS]

I'm in the process of upgrading our LH4r and LH3r servers to Win2003. I've seen quite a lot of exchanges on the forum about how it's done, but I have seen no mention of the post-upgrade support.
I'm fairly sure that HP don't support these servers once they are upgraded to Win2003, so how are you guys getting support - is it through a specialm agreement with HP or from an external resourse?
Any feedback would be grateful as I've got to get my servers under some sort of maintenance contract.

[kris rombauts · Accepted solution]

Ian,

putting a unsupported OS release on the server will not affect your H/W maintenance contract and H/W support from HP at first, what is proven to be broken will be replaced as with any other component failure. You have to realise that for certain issues that might show up one day, you'll be on your own as none of the server utilities and drivers have been tested on w2k3 on the server model in question, so you might have to live with some of the side effects/minor issues if they show up.

LH4 and LH3 become very old machines,don't think their is still the ability to now start a new maintenance contract on them, LH4 went off the price list in 1999 and normally it's 5 years H/W support after that, we are 7 years later now... so i doubt it can be done but pls check with HP.

If i.e. you face a server that intermittendly hangs/reboots for no apparent reason and many parts have been swapped and it still does not fix it, HP may ask you to run the system with a supported release of an OS so that it can be proven it is not a OS related issue (driver, OS bug, 3th party s/w etc etc)

Worst thing that can happen is that an issue cannot be properly troubleshoot on your server because of different behavior of the utilities or undecoded error log entries on w2k3 i.e.

In general their will be no issue but it's just that you have to realize you're taking the decision now and it can have some disadvantages later, hopefully none, and their is no real blame then towards the H/W vendor if they cannot provide you the normal support/troubleshooting to fix your issue.

Their is no special agreement with HP i am aware off.


my 2 cents

Kris

[kris rombauts]

And here is the support matrix, only TC-series servers from the pre-merger HP Netserver productline do support w2k3

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=lpn14552&locale=en_US&prodSeriesId=50451&prodTypeId=15351


HTH

Kris