Platform Change from AIX/DB2 to Windows

Name	Points
Greg Moeller	4184
David Williams	3349
JonA	3288
Kat V	2984
Woozy	1973
Jimmy Chiu	1883
Kwane McNeal	1437
Ragu Raghavan	1348
Roger French	1311
mark.cook	1244

Woozy

Veteran Member

Posts: 709

7/25/2013 2:58 PM

I'd like to get some insight from all you Gurus out there.

We are currently running LSF 9.0.1.11/S3 Apps 9.0.1.7 as well as Landmark 9.2.5/TM 3.4.2. On both systems we are currently running on IBM Power 7 boxes with AIX and DB2 SQL. We are preparing to upgrade to v10 on both systems in the next year. We are very strongly considering doing a platform change from AIX to Windows at the same time for a number of reasons. As we are considering this, I thought I'd see what insight all of you folks have on this issue.

If we go this route, we will be running virtual Windows servers in a VMWare environment (we have a very significant infrastructure and expertise in place, and use this heavily for other systems). We host internally, but we are under a Managed Services contract through Infor.

Here are some specific questions I've been chewing on:
1. Can we continue to run DB2 SQL (preferably on Linux) if we move the apps to Windows or do we have to change to MSSQL?
- If we have to change to MSSQL, what do we need to be concerned about (we know that some tables and fields are named differently, and that syntax is somewhat different)?
2. Are there any significant differences that we need to be aware of from an interfacing perspective (we use lots of SQL, as well as PFI and IPA)?
3. Have any of you done this? Would you be willing to chat with us about your experience?
4. Should we do a "fresh" install of v10, or install our "current" version on Windows and then upgrade to V10? (We're leaning toward the latter, to make it easier to isolate issue causality)

Any other insight or suggestions would be extremely helpful. At this point, we're at the pre-pre-planning stage and we're just trying to decide how much we want to bite off in this upgrade.

Thanks! Kelly

Kwane McNeal

Veteran Member

Posts: 479

7/25/2013 3:28 PM

(My apologies if this is hard to read, forced to do this from my cell phone)

Kelly,
Ok this is a big set of questions:

Overview: LSF will be more challenging than Landmark/LTM, but not by much.

1) Yes you can, and it's highly suggested to not do the database at the exact same time, unless you have to. Also keep in mind LSF is now certified to run on Linux itself. This should be highly considered.

2) If you change databases, yes, significantly so. If not, there are areas of pain, but managable.

3) Yes, I have a fair bit of experience all the way back to Env 7

4) Call me on this one. My general rule is you can upgrade and migrate platforms simultaneously, if you're NOT changing DB, otherwise, do the upgrade first, then do the platform. There are a host of other factors that need to be answered before a firm answer can be given.

Call me directly or private message me here...

Kwane
505-433-7744

Randall

Veteran Member

Posts: 44

7/29/2013 4:40 PM

I worked at a previous client that ran Lawson on Windows/VM environment; just a couple of things that I noticed that you may have already taken into consideration:

The server group at this location set the VM to automatically assign resources for our Lawson instances, and ended up being very well below what Lawson recommended. As you could imagine, this caused some significant performance issues within the entire system. However, you mentioned group has a lot of experience with that environment, so you should be good.
It's been 2 years since I've been at this location, but at the time they were switching from rebooting the server from monthly to weekly because of sporadic system issues. Our Production Support provider at the time could never determine a root cause of certain hung processes to where the easiest resolution was to reboot.
While I was there, MKS had decided to review all of their licensing agreements with clients. MKS was attempting to require a license for all users on the system. Lawson's Unix Utilities (LUU) at the time had some issues with POs, upgrade programs, and something else I can't recall. Basically, anything that made a call to the command line to call a script would bomb out.
Since then, I've not been on a Windows environment, so I've not paid a whole lot of attention on how LUU and MKS licensing has progressed.
There was some discovery being done about an archiving tool provided by IBM. Since IBM, at least at the time, charges for their products by CPU cores, they wanted to charge for every CPU core on the server running the VM instances. The server was pretty beefy as it ran several other applications on a multi-tenant environment. The cost ended up being outrageous and shelved.

My overall sys admin knowledge is limited, so these all may be things you've taken into consideration or have been resolved in the past couple of years.

Hope it's helpful,
Randall

Woozy

Veteran Member

Posts: 709

8/16/2013 12:58 PM

Hi All - after a number of very unproductive conversations with Infor, we've decided not to pursue the platform change at this time. We've been trying to get sizing information for Windows, and we keep getting referred to a hardware vendor (!) instead of getting the information we're asking for. It seems to us that Infor should know what is required to run their software...but I guess not.

In any case, we're going to stay on AIX/DB2 for now. Maybe we'll have the strength to consider this another time.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Kelly