Upgrade from 10.20 to 11.i - do we need new hardware?

[Debbie Fleith]

HP just sent out notifications that 10.20 will be obsoleted 6/30/2003. They are encouraging all to trade-up their servers. I have about ten 10.20 customers currently on D220 servers, with 64 MB memory and 4 GB disk. I already know that a fresh install to 11i would be required, rather than the update path, do to filesystem space requirements. What I really need to know is whether 11i would run satisfactorilly on a D220 with the minimum requirements.

Do I need to suggest to all of my customers that their D220 servers need to be traded up, or is it reasonable to think that a fresh install to 11i would be sufficient? I only need to install the base, default HPUX Base and a small database application.

[Patrick Wallek]

The 4GB disk and 64 MB RAM are absolute minimum. The D220 processor should run it fine, though I think it will just run the 32 bit version and not the 64 bit.

I would recommend upgrading the OS disk to a 9 GB disk, 2 if possible, and mirror them, and upgrade your RAM to at least 256 MB.

Just my $0.02

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Debbie:

You might want to see what kind of trade-in you could get to replace your D-class with L-class servers. You might find that this is more inexpensive in terms of maintenance and support contracts over time. Adding memory isn't cheap and your 64MB is an absolute minimum. My other preference, if you keep the D-server would be to replace the 4GB boot disk with a 9GB disk.

It is *cleanest* [read "most-likely-to-succeed"] if you opt for a cold install of 11.x instead of taking an upgrade path. Also, you have the advantage of resizing your vg00 filesystems easily at that time. Replacing the old 4GB disk housing 10.20 with a larger disk might also allow you to keep the old 4GB for secondary swap and sort space depending upon your application requirements.

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

64 megs and a 4Gb disk are barely adequate to run HP-UX, much less any siginificant applications. The D220's are good machines and will run well but not if they are starved for RAM. On the other hand, if the applications run on them work well and are not paging to disk due to lack of memoery, 11i should be just fine. (congratulations on really small programs--normally an oddity in Unix)

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
Just go the way, that JRF recommended.
Minimum is a 9 GB disk mirrored.
Think about an upgrade of the D to a L-class
server. It might save you some money for the support. We are in the process of replacing an old I70 with an N4000. The N-class will cost less inlcuding three years of support than the support for the I70 alone.
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

[Volker Borowski]

Hello,

may be my box ist somewhat off the standard... :-)

I have an old E45, running 11.0 (upgraded from 10.20 smoothly) with a single 2GB disk in VG00.
I had to put a secondary swap of 600M on a second disk, but this was for application reasons (We run an SAP 3.1I with SAP-DB on it, but nothing else).
It has 384MB of RAM.

Now this is nothing to be very productive with it (the SAP is our demo-system), but as far as the UX-Upgrade is concerned, it did not change anything concerning performance.

The box is coming from UX 9.04, and is still running HFS filesystems on all disks (SAP-DB is running from raw devices, so we saw no profit from adjusting it).

You should check, if you get new version of your application SW, that requires more resources under 11.0.

HTH
Volker

[Debbie Fleith]

Thank you all for the info. I will definitely check the advantages of trading up to an L class.

However, if we upgrade the D220 hardware to a 9 GB disk, 256 MB memory, what size swap should I configure? The guide suggests a 1 GB swap. Is that really the correct guideline?

[John Bolene]

We run a D box with 1 gig of memory and 2 9 gig drives and use 1 gig for swap. It is also a dual processor.

We also run several hundred C110 that we upgraded to 11 with 256 meg memory and 2 4 gig drives. Most of one 4 gig is needed for the OS and all the patches.

On 11, I would consider the minimums to be 256 meg memory and one 4 gig drive. This assumes that you do not have much application data on the machine.

[Debbie Fleith]

John,
What size swap do you configure on the C110 servers? Is swap size = double RAM still a good guideline?

[Gram Ludlow]

Debbie-
If you are getting sufficient performance with only 64 megs of RAM, you certainly wont be needing 1gig of swap memory. If you do decide to upgrade to 256 megs of RAM, you could probably get away with 512 meg SWAP and be just fine. I suggest using glance to see your current memory usage, and make sure that you keep ram + swap under the maximum that you use now.

Remember that swap is just slow RAM. If you don't use anything memory intensive, the extra swap wont do anything but take up disk space.