Upgrading from Connections 2.5 to 3.0 seems to be difficult
by Volker Weber
IBM writes:
Starting Friday August 6th we will begin our upgrade and migration of Lotus Connections 2.5 to Lotus Connections 3.0. The Lotus Connections services will not be available from Friday August 6th at 8:00 AM until it comes back online Tuesday August 10th.
4 to 5 days
Comments
I was thinking the exact same thing when I saw that. I've never done a Connections 2.5 to 3.0 upgrade and from the looks of it I don't think I'd want to.
Is Frank on leave? :-)
You can't really upgrade, the WAS version changes from 6.x to 7.x and there is no upgrade for that. What you will end up doing is crating a new environment the data over and "massaging" it to fit.
The Lotus Greenhouse environment has a massive amount of data in Lotus Connections and their deployment is a unique system at IBM in that it gets all of our Beta (and sometime alpha) code through plug-in and extensions. Keeping that in mind, I would not generalize the upgrade as difficult. Also, as Victor point out, they are also making system changes to the application server and other environmental technologies.
Mac, would you say the amount of data is any more massive than a typical customer deployment? Will customers also need to make the changes to the application server during their 2.5 to 3.0 upgrade and migration?
http://edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/information-week-microsofts-eating-caviar-in-the-cloud
Good to see that Microsoft really understands the concepts of 24/7 availability and system redundancy in 2010. Apparently, they've decided none of their MSDN bloggers need to be on the air for a full week!
Read Only , vs Down
:)
This is where you the split (but getting less so) IBM personality shows.
On one hand, the weaker, older N/D personality makes fun of MS (and other NON-IBM platforms) requirement to always MIGRATE/TRANSITION to new servers & hardware when moving versions.
On the other, the new, dominant IBM personality buys into the MIGRATION/TRANSITION mentality 110%.
On the one hand, I have to side with Mac on this. The IBM Greenhouse implementation is not like the standard implementations you would see inside a corporation. Not only are there all of the alpha and beta plugins as Mac mentinoed, but the site has a ton of customizations.
On the other hand, it IS going to be more like a migration than an upgrade. There will be a lot to do and the WAS upgrade will be a big deal. Most smaller companies may have a lot of downtime if they're having to rip and replace because they don't have extra hardware for provisioning a new WAS system. I would imagine larger companies may also run into this as they may be running on systems like AIX spanning multiple servers. It may require a lot of downtime for them as well. But if you have extra hardware or VM space then you can begin the WAS 7.0 installation on those as well as beginning the Connections installation process. Then you may require less downtime as you're mostly just moving data over and running some conversion scripts along with re-implementing your customizations.
All that said, if you have a fairly vanilla Connections implementation I would think that a 3-4 hour downtime window wouldn't be unusual and it could probably be accomplished in 1 or 2 depending on the number of profiles and other database entries that may need to be updated. But YMMV. :)
To be fair (since people seem to think I was not) I received the following email at 4:30am:
"We are happy to announce we are back online with Lotus Connections Beta 3.0 check it out!!! There are some customizations that need to be configured and a few issues that have been identified with our testing that need to be addressed. We will start this work on Monday."
Yeah but how many people have "vanilla" installations; I can't think of one customer who did not have at least a couple of changes required. 3-4 hours would be a dream come true. The reality that I fully expect to experience is at least double that on average and many, many, many PMR's opened on odd/sad/should not exist issues.
