11i

[Dave La Mar]

Sorry people. Have been having a time this week with submits and replies.
We are at 11.0.
1. Do most shops upgrade with each new release or only when enhancements are pertinent.
2. Has anyone gone from 11.0 to 11.i and seen vast improvements?
Thanks for any input.
dl

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Dave:

I would say that most shops tend to delay upgrades as long as possible. I do not suggest that this is good practice but I suspect that an attitude of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' prevails. I tend to take the other approach and prefer to upgrade fairly soon after a new release. Usually the limiting factor is the application software. I have found no applications which run under 11.0 that will not run under 11.11 (11i). Having said that, I run no HP-UX 9x applications. Unlike the upgrade from 10.20 to 11.0, the 11.0 to 11.11 upgrade does work as long as you
have enough spare room in / and /stand.

The only bugs that I have found in 11.11 related to STM and those have now been corrected. Other than that one issue, I've had it running on my sandbox since March and on other servers including production boxes since the summer. It's been rock solid.

If you can talk the powers that be into this (and it really saves them money), the ideal environment for deployment patches and upgrades is this:
1) Install on sandbox (this can be a fairly low-end (used) machine and test. If ok after a time,
2) Install in your test environment (where your test applications run and possibly your developers work. If ok after a time and when schedule permits,
3) Install in production environment.

Regards, Clay

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Dave:

I have not (yet) upgraded to 11i, but I will offer some general, philosophical comments.

I'm not the early adoptor type. I prefer to hop onto a product lifecycle sometime after it first leaves the gate. A developement or test system, is the ideal place to start.

I look for new releases for several reasons. First, obviously, for new features. Secondly, I don't want to end up running a release that is no longer supported, or in a situation where I need to upgrade *hardware* and concomittantly *must* upgrade software to do so. It's so much easier and so much safer (read less stress) to change one thing at a time whenever possible.

As for performance, in their release documentation, HP notes, "performance with HP-UX 11i is generally better than HP-UX 11.0 when the software configurations are the same."

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B3920-90091/B3920-90091.html

Release 11.11 (a.k.a 11i) was introduced over a year ago, and has certainly stablized (see the link below). Of course, for their own (very valid) reasons, HP is pushing adoption of 11.i. After all, *their* contractual support costs fall as more users adopt a homogeneous set of software.

http://www.software.hp.com/HPUX-RDMP/history/slide2.html

Regards!

...JRF...

[Michael Tully]

Hi Dave,

We have just built our first 11i box on an
A400 to see what it is like and to evaluate
some applications, before we get an rp8400
to play with. In answer to your questions,
I don't believe most shops upgrade for the
sake of doing it, in fact it usually is
because it is necessary due to some reason.

Hardware capability. We are looking at
purchasing rp8400's in the very near future
instead of an abundance of 'N' class servers
to service our peoplesoft applications. We
are also looking at centralising our
warehouse applications onto two rp8400's
and phasing out our 'K' class servers.

Seeing 11i has been around now for about a
year any 'real' problems surfacing would
have been ironed out by now. So in summary
it means get a copy and evlauate it if you
can. There is nothing like experimenting new
software yourself.

My 3 cents worth

-Michael

[harry d brown jr]

Going from 11.00 to 11i is painless, and should be done when you have tested the migration. If you plan on hardware upgrades, then toss in the new OS install. I've installed 11i over 50 times, and always a cold install.

This process of keeping up on upgrades teaches you a valuable lesson: DO NOT PUT ANYTHING IN THE BASE OS DIRECTORIES.

All applications, databases, and other configuration files need to go into some other VG other than VG00. It makes for a fast install of a new OS, and then loading of the apps/databases/other stuff.

Their are also negatives; the new OS might require more server resources = disk/memory/cpu. So you need to be careful, but don't get stuck having a 10.20 system by the end of 2002. I've seen people post here recently regarding 9.04 and 10.04 OS's. They have a lot of work in front of them.

live free or die

harr

[Dave La Mar]

Thanks to all who replied.
dl