Greetings Fellow TSMers,
This morning I received some bad news from Tivoli support:
Moving a TSM database between platforms (in my case, from AIX to HP-UX) is
not supported.
This REALLY hurts. We have installed a new HP L2000 server and HP 20/700
library, to which we want to migrate our TSM environment. After much
discussion with both HP and Tivoli, we were assured that this environment
would be fully supported, and would function quite well. All parties knew
that we were currently running our TSM server on AIX, and I would
reasonably assume they knew we would want to migrate our database to the
new environment.
Last week we attempted to restore the database on the new server in order
to do some stress testing... the plan was to start running some test
system backups on the new server in preparation for the cutover. We got an
ANR9999D error message, "invalid block header... etc". Yesterday, I opened
PMR 83621 with Tivoli support, and spoke to them this morning. They
informed me that backup db / restore db is only supported on the same
platform. They said export/import might work, but it is unsupported, as
they CANNOT GUARANTEE THERE WOULD BE NO DATA LOSS. I will be trying that,
and I guess the only way to verify if it works will be to do some actual
restores from the new server.
To make matters worse, Tivoli told me that I would not be able to check in
tapes from the AIX server to the HP server. This hurts me two ways: the
initial migration, and we will not be able to use the AIX server as a
disaster recovery machine, as we intended to do. However, they did say
that virtual volumes between platforms is supported.
I guess this leaves me with only one option... I'll have to keep the AIX
server online until all the data residing on it expires, which in my case
will take at least a year. We'll run all new backups on the new server.
We'll continue expiring and reclaiming on the old server, and move the
scratches to the new machine as they become available. We'll run restores
from the old server when needed.
If anyone has done a migration from one Unix platform to another, please
let me know how it was done, and any problems encountered.
As I told Tivoli support, it's bad enough that I can't do this; it's much
worse that it isn't well documented. It should be emblazoned in bold red
letters that once you choose a server platform, there is no supported way
to migrate data to another. This betrays the spirit of open systems.
Robin Sharpe
Berlex Laboratories
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